LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 






UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Unitarian Affirmations 
^elien EHscoutses 

GIVEN IN 

WASHINGTON, D.C. 

By UNITARIAN MINISTERS. 



. 



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BO STON: 

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION. 

1879. 

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(the library! 

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1WA8HTNOI211J 



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Copyright by 
American Unitarian Association. 

1879. " 



University Press : John Wilson 
Cambridge. 



PREFACE. 



The following seven discourses were delivered on 
successive Sunday mornings, in the early part of the 
year 1879, at the new Unitarian Church in Wash- 
ington City, by invitation of the pastor of the Society 
and the American Unitarian Association. All except 
the first were repeated on the same Sunday evenings 
in the Unitarian Church of Baltimore. 

The invitation was that they should be addressed, 
not especially to scholars and theologians, but to the 
people. 

They were prepared independently of each other ; 
and, for the opinions expressed, the several writers 
are alone responsible. 

Boston, May 1, 1879. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. The Universal and the Special in 

Christianity 1 

By Rev. Frederic H. Hedge, D.D. 

II. The Bible 27 

By Rev. James Freeman Clarke, D.D. 

III. God 61 

By Rev. Andrew P. Peabody, D.D. 

IV. Jesus Christ 75 

By Rev. Brooke Her ford. 

V. Man 107 

By Rev. George W. Briggs, D.D. 

VI. The Church : The Society which Jesus 

GATHERED 127 

By Rev. Rufus Ellis, D.D. 

VII. The Life Eternal. — Heaven and Hell . 155 
By Rev. Samuel R. Calthrop. 



U 



UNITARIAN AFFIRMATIONS. 



THE UNIVERSAL AND THE SPECIAL 
IN CHRISTIANITY. 

BY REV. FREDERIC H. HEDGE, D.D. 

" Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive 
that God is no respecter of persons ; but in every nation he 
that feareth him and worketh righteousness is accepted with 
him." — Acts x. 34, 35. 

" Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the 
name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." 
Matt, xxviii. 19. 

ST. PETER, if rightly reported in the passage 
first quoted, exhibits a breadth of view and 
a spirit of toleration strangely inconsistent with 
his conduct at Antioch, as witnessed by Paul 
and condemned by him in his Epistle to the 
Galatians. There, as we read, he separated him- 
self from the Gentiles, and " walked not up- 
rightly according to the truth of the gospel." 
Here, on the contrary, as afterward at Jerusa- 
1 



2 THE UNIVERSAL AND TEE 

lem, he plants himself on Christian ground, and 
displays a liberality befitting the disciple of him 
who could see in the Gentile alien a faith not 
found in Israel. 

But, whilst the apostle concedes that true re- 
ligion and acceptance with God might be found 
outside of the pale of his own communion, he 
nevertheless baptizes Cornelius and his house- 
hold into the fellowship of the Christian Church ; 
thereby implying that Christianity had something 
to impart that was more and better than any 
thing that Jew or Gentile could find within the 
compass of their respective faiths. 

Two points are here presented for our consid- 
eration : first, that all religions have something 
in common, — that all agree in their essentials; 
second, that Christianity has elements peculiar 
to itself, by virtue of which it ranks superior to 
other faiths. 

All religions have something in common, — 
all have something divine. The time has gone 
by when Christianity, in the A T iew of its confes- 
sors, could claim a monopoly of saving truth. 
Recent study of the ethnic religions has abated 
the contemptuous aversion with which Christian 
orthodoxy was wont to regard them, waiving 
them aside as damnable impostures or execrable 



SPECIAL IN CHRISTIANITY. 3 

superstitions, and their receivers as without the 
pale of salvation. This was the view with which 
Christian missionaries in former time engaged in 
the noble enterprise of rescuing those lost peo- 
ples from their imminent doom by drawing them 
into the Christian fold. They knew nothing or 
next to nothing of the religions they wished to 
supplant ; but simply assumed that, not being 
Christian, they must be utterly and only bad 
and that all who held them, unless converted and 
baptized, must perish everlastingly. If any one 
maintain that such a conviction alone can inspire 
the zeal required for missionary effort I reply 
that zeal without insight — that is, without truth 
— can never produce the best fruits of the Spirit. 
The most it can accomplish is a formal confession 
induced by fear. Its converts will be the least 
enlightened and least honorable among the peo- 
ple addressed. One cannot but respect the tem- 
per of the Norseman who was willing to be 
barjtized, but when the missionary represented 
the alternative as everlasting damnation, and, in 
answer to his questioning, assured him that all 
his ancestors, not having heard of the gospel, 
were in that predicament, withdrew his foot 
from the water, preferring rather to be damned 
with his fathers than saved without them. If 



4 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE 

the missionary had but known it, there was more 
of Christianity and more of salvation in that 
reply than in all the dogmas of his creed and all 
the sacraments of his Church. 

Of course, the missionary must believe in the 
superiority of his own religion. Without that 
belief, no missionary is qualified, or is likely to 
undertake, its promulgation in heathen lands. 
But this conviction does not necessarily imply 
indiscriminate, unqualified condemnation of other 
religions as wholly and only false and bad. The 
best-prepared missionary is he who adds to zeal 
and purity of purpose a knowledge of the men- 
tal condition, the way of thinking, the ideas and 
beliefs of those whom he seeks to convert, a 
disposition to learn, and the feeling that it is 
his business to learn, as well as to teach, that one 
important end of his mission is to gain new light 
for the illustration of the gospel from other dis- 
pensations. The missionaries who have wrought 
in this spirit have done a good work by faithful 
use of their opportunities in acquiring and im- 
porting into Christendom a knowledge of the 
faith and ideas of Gentile lands. Such knowl- 
edge enables the Christian to operate with surer 
method and better effect on the nations so re- 
ported. Our acquaintance with the Oriental re- 



SPECIAL IN CHRISTIANITY. 5 

ligions is chiefly derived from the labors of such 
men as Wilson, Spence Hardy, Ellis, and the 
Abbe Hue. Our best knowledge of the works 
of Confucius, founder of the eldest religion of 
China, we owe to Dr. Legge of the London Mis- 
sionary Society, "who gives it as the result of 
twenty-one years of missionary experience that 
he could not consider himself qualified for the 
duties of his position until he had thoroughly mas- 
tered the classical books of the Chinese, and in- 
vestigated for himself the whole field of thought 
through which the sages of China had ranged 
and which gave the foundation of the moral, so- 
cial, and political life of the people." * Not till 
then did he feel himself to be in a condition to 
preach Christianity to the Chinese. 

Above all, it is required of the missionary that 
he respect the faith of the people to whom he 
ministers, and frankly recognize whatever in it 
is worthy and true. " Every religion," says 
Max Milller, " even the most imperfect and de- 
graded, has something that ought to be sacred 
to us. There is in all religions a secret yearning 
after the true though unknown God. Whether 
we see the Papua squatting in dumb meditation 
before his fetish, or whether we listen to Ferdusi 
* Quoted from Mdx Miiller. 



6 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE 

exclaiming, c The height and depth of the whole 
world have their centre in thee, O my God ; I 
know not what thou art, but I know that thou 
art what thou alone canst be,' — we ought to feel 
that the ground whereon we stand is holy." 

All religions have something in them of divine 
import. However poor, earthly, unspiritual, 
monstrous even, the materials, the doctrine, and 
the rite that compose their service, they are kin- 
dled from above. The altar may be fed with 
base superstitions, with cruelty and pain, w T ith 
self-torture and human sacrifice ; but no altar 
could ever burn until a spark of heavenly fire, a 
ray from the everlasting God, had descended 
upon it. The uses may be false and detestable, 
but the purpose is true and the end is holy. 
Adoration, Purification, Reconciliation, — these 
are the purpose and the end, whatever name the 
religion may bear, whatever methods employ, 
whatever phase it may assume. 

Common to all religions is the belief in God- 
head. Infinitely various are the creeds which 
express this fundamental belief, infinitely various 
the systems which formulate it and in w T hich it 
subsists, — monotheism in one race, polytheism 
in another; Trinitarianism in this church, XJni- 
tarianism in that; but what lies at the core of 



SPECIAL IN CHRISTIANITY. 7 

these various systems is substantially the same, 

— belief in superhuman, absolute Power. 
There is one apparent exception to this uni- 
versality, and that in the case of the religion 
which numbers at present the largest following, 

— a following in all its branches of more than 
four hundred millions of believers, — the religion 
of Buddhism. But even here the exception is 
only partial : it relates to some of the attributes 
of Deity, not to the essential fact. The Bud- 
dhist has no God in the sense of an aboriginal, 
supermundane Power, creator, and ruler of the 
universe : he believes that the universe is a power 
in itself, self-existent, eternal. But the Buddhist 
adores the founder of his faith, the king's son 
who renounced his inheritance, who made him- 
self poor, of no account, and by faith and patience 
overcame the world and attained to perfection of 
holiness. The Buddhist makes a God of him, 
and worships in him the superhuman ideal, the 
infinite greatness and worth. 

In one or another form, with different names, 
with endless modifications, every religion holds 
the fundamental article of Godhead. Every re- 
ligion offers something superhuman to believe in, 
to restrain, to aspire after, to adore. If it be but 
a shapeless block, that block represents the su- 



8 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE 

pernal and divine to the cowering savage who 
prostrates himself before it in prayer. In this 
primary article all religions agree ; and let us add, 
they are all in this alike imperfect. Paul found 
the Athenians worshipping an unknown god. Is 
not this the condition of worshipping humanity 
the world over, even now ? Is not all religion a 
feeling after God, if haply we may find Him who 
is never far from any one of us, and whose very 
nearness perhaps conceals him? Who knows 
God except in those points of osculation in 
which our limited nature touches his ? What sage 
or saint who has spent his life in devout contem- 
plation can say, " I know him quite." What re- 
ligion, the purest and most enlightened, presents 
him otherwise than in part ? Who that is truly 
and wisely devout will not confess with Fichte : 
" I veil my face before thee and lay my hand 
upon my mouth. How thou art in thyself, how 
thou appearest to thyself, I can never know, so 
surely as I never can be thou. After thousand 
times thousand spirit-lives lived through, I shall 
no more be able to comprehend thee than in this 
earthly hut. That which I comprehend becomes 
by my comprehending it finite, and the finite can 
never by any process of magnifying and exalting 
become infinite." 



SPECIAL IN CHRISTIANITY. 9 

Common to all religions and fundamental in 
all is the notion of duty, the feeling of moral 
obligation, with its correlate, moral accountabil- 
ity. Every religion, savage or civilized, what- 
ever else it might teach or fail to teach, has said 
to its votaries, " Thou shalt," and " Thou shalt 
not." They command and forbid. The com- 
mandments and prohibitions are not the same in 
all: they vary indefinitely. The specifications 
of right and wrong, the applications of the moral 
law, differ widely in different systems ; but the 
idea of law, the sense of right and wrong, re- 
quirement and prohibition, are in all. So rooted 
in human nature is the feeling of duty, that man 
instinctively fetches his commandments from a 
source above himself until he has learned the 
meaning of right, and has come to feel the abso- 
lute authority of what is meant by that term. 
Until then, he derives the obligation of the law 
from arbitrary command ; that is, he puts power 
before right, makes power the source and meas- 
ure of right, and conceives that right is right 
only because commanded, and not rather com- 
manded because right. Thus religion becomes 
the moral educator of mankind. By positive pre- 
cept and external authority, it trains the yet un- 
developed moral sense until man learns to find 



10 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE 

the law and the reason of the law in himself, and 
by the light of his own perceptions to choose the 
good and avoid the evil. 

Say not that religion is degraded by making it 
subservient to the moral nature, instead of an 
independent and the supreme interest in life. 
There is nothing higher in man than righteous- 
ness. That is the top of being; and religion ful- 
fils its best function, though by no means its only 
function, when it aids our ascent to that supreme 
height. Nay, more : the truth of its moral ideas 
is the standard by which every positive religion 
must be judged. A form of religion, a scheme 
of doctrine, which affronts or fails to satisfy our 
sense of right, carries with it its own condem- 
nation. 

There is one thing more which all religions 
have in common, — the promise of a better here- 
after, the hope of redemption, release from the 
burden and the trial, the weary struggle, the pains 
and discontents of mortal life; — Heaven, which 
different systems figure with very different condi- 
tions, according to the habits and culture of their 
receivers, but which all agree in representing as 
a state of painlessness and rest. Heaven, I say, not 
Immortality. Immortality is an after-thought, 
a metaphysical abstraction which supervenes, not 



SPECIAL IX CHRISTIANITY. 11 

the primary, the essential element in the uni- 
versal hope. And in one of the religions already 
referred to it is doubtful if immortal life, or life 
at all, in our sense of the term, can be predicated 
of that hope. Buddhism differs from other re- 
ligions in divesting the final Rest of those attri- 
butes of conscious thought and will without which 
the Western mind can conceive of no heaven. 
The Buddhist heaven is a state of actionless, 
aimless, will-less repose, — Nirvana; concerning 
which it is a question with the critics whether to 
regard it as a form of existence at all, or not 
rather as cessation of individual life. Be that 
as it may, to the Buddhist, in whose estimation 
existence as such is an evil, Nirvana is an object 
of desire, a wished-for goal, a supreme hope. 
And in that sense Buddhism has also, like the 
other religions, a heaven in its creed. 

God, duty, heaven ; worship, obedience, hope, 
— these are constituents in every religion. And 
this consent of all faiths in what is most essen- 
tial bears significant witness of the common 
mind of which all races and nations, in their 
several degrees of capacity and culture, par- 
take. Thus, in all religions there is something 
saving and divine. When the apostle says, " By 
faith are ye saved," it is not the topics of faith 



12 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE 

but the faculty of faith that possesses this saving 
power. 

Admire with me this faculty of faith, that heav- 
enly spark which the Everlasting has lodged in 
the human breast, by which man can overtop 
himself and overcome the world, can glory in 
tribulation, walk through fire, condemn him- 
self to life-long torture, and find repose on the 
rack ; can record his thought in scriptures that 
shnll live when the language in which they are 
written has ceased for a thousand years to be 
spoken by living men, for w T hich colleges shall be 
founded and w T hich men of genius shall spend 
their lives in deciphering, — thnt faith that can 
express its convictions in mountains of stone which 
Nature shall adopt as her own, granting them, 
as the poet says, " an equal date w r ith Andes 
and with Ararat." 

We have now to inquire what the Christian 
religion adds to these fundamentals ; what special 
and characteristic features distinguish it from, 
and exalt it above, the other religions of the 
world. 

It has been the custom of Christian apologists, 
when contrasting their own with other dispen- 
sations, to rest the superiority of the former on 



SPECIAL JN CHRISTIANITY. 13 

the ground of its moral code. Christianity, they 
have claimed, excels all other religions as a prac- 
tical rule of life. I very much question the va- 
lidity of this argument. To substantiate the 
alleged superiority of the Christian dispensation 
in this particular, it needs not only be shown 
that certain precepts of the gospel are peculiar, 
and surpass the moral import of other codes, — 
a point, by the way, which those who are best 
acquainted with the sacred books of other re- 
ligions will be least inclined to insist on, — but 
also it must be shown that those precepts have 
fructified in the life; that Christians in the mass 
are morally better than the subjects of other 
faiths. For what does it signify that Jesus as 
a moralist contemplated a higher standard than 
Confucius or Gautama or Zoroaster, if the Chris- 
tian Church has failed to realize that standard in 
the peoples subject to its sway? If this criterion 
be applied, it is far from certain that the claim 
of moral superiority can be established. It is 
doubtful if Christian nations are better than 
others, except so far as intellectual progress — 
ichich is not the product of religion, out of race 
and clime — has raised the moral standard in 
lands the most advanced, intellectually and po- 
litically, of those that bear the Christian name. 



14 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE 

Compare the average Christian of the Eastern 
Church in Syria or Asia Minor with the average 
Turk or Jew, his neighbor : I doubt if the com- 
parison will much redound to the advantage of 
the former. It is also to be observed, in this 
connection, that Jesus did not claim for his moral 
system any thing more than the fulfilment of 
the Hebrew code. 

It is not in its ethics that I find the true dis- 
tinction of the Christian dispensation, but in its 
theory, its far-reaching and reconciling vision, its 
humanitarian scope and intent. 

Characteristic of Christianity is its intimate, 
organic relation to its founder. This seems to 
be symbolized in its very name. All historic 
religions are designated by the names of their au- 
thors by those outside of their pale ; but within 
their several folds they have other appellations, 
Christianity is so designated, not only by outsid- 
ers, but by its disciples. The religion has no 
other name, or — if the use of the word "gospel " 
be thought a limitation of tins assertion — none 
so universal as this. The fact is significant : it 
shows that the consciousness of Christendom 
connects the religion indivisibly with its author, 
as being not merely a teacher of certain truths 
which can be detached from the teacher, and 



SPECIAL IN CHRISTIANITY. 15 

which, provided they are received, it matters not 
whence they are derived, but as being, in a sense, 
himself the religion taught ; a principle implant- 
ed, a power embodied, in the Christian Church, 
which constitutes the life of its life, and which 
no analysis less searching than the supreme chem- 
istry of death can eradicate thence. Suppose 
we had the precise teachings of Jesus without 
his personality, — a doctrine derived from an 
unknown source or referred to some venerable 
name like that of Pythagoras or Plato ; and 
suppose a body of followers organized for the 
maintenance and practice of that doctrine, — 
would that be essential Christianity, — Chris- 
tianity in all but the name? It would be so 
perhaps from the point of view of what is called 
Free Religion, but not as the Christian world 
understands Christianity. Christianity, as the 
Christian world receives it, is the doctrine of 
Jesus plus the personality. That personality is 
a spiritual force introduced into human society, 
which lives and works in the world to this day. 
The same is true in a measure of every great per- 
sonality. Every great and noble life once lived in 
the world becomes a part of the world for ever- 
more. To find the distinctive in Christianity, 
therefore, we have further to inquire what it is 



16 THE UNIVERSAL AXD THE 

that the personality of Jesus represents, as distin- 
guished from other wise and holy men, — teachers, 
prophets, founders of new faiths. The answer is 
given in the phrase, " Son of God," an epithet ap- 
plied to no other teacher in the sense in which it 
is applied to him and appropriated by him. 

Jesus represents divine Sonship. I say repre- 
sents : that word implies something behind the 
representative, an antecedent idea or fact. The 
representation includes the being, illustrates it 
by a special example, but does not bound it, does 
not confine it, does not exhaust it. Divine son- 
ship is not exhausted by Christ. It is no mo- 
nopoly conferred by birth or purchased by blood. 
Paul says grandly, " As many as are led by the 
spirit of God are sons of God." " Partakers of 
the divine nature," says the Second Epistle of 
Peter. Humanity is the son of God, Humanity 
in esse or in posse. This is the truth which Jesus 
represents, which he illustrates by a supreme in- 
stance. 

We have here, then, a distinguishing feature 
of the Christian dispensation : it reveals a divine 
sonship, implying as its correlate the fatherhood 
of God. 

And that fatherhood of God, in the sense in 
which the gospel presents it, is also a peculiarity 



SPECIAL IX CHRISTIANITY. 17 

of the Christian faith. Not that the appellative 
Father, as applied to God, is wanting in other 
religions, Jewish and Gentile ; but in them it 
signifies, as I understand it, fatherly care, not 
identity of essence, — not the homousian affinity 
of God with man which Jesus intends when he 
says, " I and the Father are one," and which he 
recognizes in his followers, — "As thou, Father, 
art in me, and I in thee, that they may be one in 
us." If the text seem to limit this affinity to 
Christian believers, we are to understand that 
limitation as strictly subjective, — a limitation of 
consciousness, not of nature. Christianity af- 
firms an affinity, an essential unity of God and 
man, — a divinity in man, a humanity in God; 
a divine humanity unknown in other religions, 
distinguishing it from Jewish and Mohammedan 
monotheism on the one hand, and Hellenic poly- 
theism on the other. The God of Judaism is 
a sharply defined individual, high and lone, be- 
tween whom and man there was no communica- 
tion but through the ministry of angels, or medi- 
ating voices speaking " to the fathers by the 
prophets." On the other hand, the Graeco-Italic 
theology (and the same is true of the Indian 
and Egyptian) presented a multitudinous host of 
questionable individualities, deifications of nature, 
2 



18 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE 

or deified men, a confused tissue of "genealogies 
and old wives' fables," in which the central Unity 
was lost, and whose mythic immoralities ignored 
the supreme Holiness. Christianity is the recon- 
ciliation and corrective of these extremes. It 
preserves the essential unity of Semitic mono- 
theism without its rigidity and insulation. It 
preserves the expansiveness and inclusiveness 
of ethnic polytheism without its dissolutions and 
corruptions. The God of Christianity is one, 
but not an individual ; undivided and uncircum- 
scribed ; unity, but not a unit ; not spatially 
secluded and self-confined like the Hebrew Jeho- 
vah, but space-pervading and self-imparting, 
equally removed from egoistic isolation on one 
side and indiscriminate monism on the other ; 
not the impersonal God of a levelling pantheism, 
which knows but one agent as w T ell as one sub- 
stance, yet not a fixed, reserved, but an ever- 
proceeding personality. 

This leads me to speak of another distinguish- 
ing feature of the Christian dispensation. This 
flowing personality is what is meant by the Holy 
Spirit. Proper to Christendom is the confession 
of the Holy Spirit. I do not assert that no trace 
of belief in spirit can be found outside of the 
Christian world. I cannot forget those memo- 



SPECIAL IN CHRISTIANITY. 19 

rable words of Seneca : " There is a holy spirit 
within us, observer of our good and our evil ; 
our guardian who treats us according as he is 
treated by us." But the spirit intended by Sen- 
eca was an individual spirit, a good genius. The 
affirmation of the Spirit as a fundamental article 
of theology, as a necessary element in the con- 
cept of Godhead, is peculiar to Christianity. No 
other religion before or since has ever proclaimed 
that quickening, energizing truth. The writers 
of the New Testament did not undertake to de- 
fine it, they delivered no dogma concerning it : 
they simply affirmed it as one of the aspects and 
modes of Deity, a member of that divine " Econ- 
omy " in the faith of which Christian converts 
were to be baptized. But the theologians of 
other centuries reasoned and wrangled about it 
until it well-nigh vanished from the Church, until 
the virtue and the power of it were lost in a for- 
mula. That formula, intended to be final, was 
indorsed with a codicil which rent Christendom 
asunder. We need not perplex ourselves w T ith 
the question wmether, as held by the Eastern 
Church, the Spirit proceeds from the Father 
alone, or whether, as affirmed by the Western, it 
proceeds from the Father and the Son : enough 
that it proceeds, — eternally proceeds. Think of 



20 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE 

it, dwell on it, ponder the intense significance of 
that idea! — Spirit not an entity, not a fixed 
quantum, but a process, a process for ever re- 
newed, a flowing personality, Godhead in flux. 
What other religion has propounded an idea so 
deep-searching, so far-reaching, so all-embracing? 
By participation of the Spirit, and in the degree 
in which man is penetrated, possessed, and re- 
newed by the Spirit, he is one with God, the son 
with the Father. For only of the spiritual man 
is the saying true, — only he, in the plenitude of 
his God-consciousness, will dare to appropriate 
it, — "I and the Father are one." Not man as 
member of the animal kingdom, — not man, the 
head of the anthropoids, — but he whom Paul 
terms "the second man," "the Lord from 
heaven ; " the man whom no law of nature has 
fetched from original protoplasm, whom no doc- 
trine of evolution can derive from ancestral mo- 
nera, though billions of years be allowed for the 
process. 

Father, Son, and Spirit, — we have here the 
characteristic confession of the Christian faith. 
But is not this the old ecclesiastical tradition which 
the very name of our communion, the name Uni- 
tarian, is understood to repudiate? Why not 
say " Trinity " at once, and so confess the Uni- 



SPECIAL IN CHRISTIANITY. 21 

tarian protest to have been a mistake ? For 
sundry sufficient reasons. I am speaking of what 
is peculiar to Christianity ; but Trinity is found 
in other religions, — notably in the well-known 
instance of the Indian trimurti, a dogma of 
the Brahman. Then, the word " Trinity" is mis- 
leading. It brings into theology a numerical 
element ; it changes the question of Godhead 
from an ontological to a numerical one ; and, in 
spite of all apologies and protests, it points in the 
direction of tritheism. There is no mention of 
trinity in the New Testament, none in the Chris- 
tian writers of the first century. In an evil 
hour, Tertullian, in his controversy with Praxeas, 
toward the close of the second century, made 
use of the word trinitas^ and with it unwittingly 
flung an apple of discord into the Church, over 
which theologians have agonized and clamored 
and wrangled from then until now. Questions 
arose, of substance and hypostasis, of ho??iousio?i 
and homoiousion, monothelete and clyothelete, 
which had as little to do, I will not say with 
practical Christianity, but with Christian theol- 
ogy as presented in the New Testament, as the 
incarnations of Vishnu. 

Beside its irrelevancy and perversion of essen- 
tial Christianity, I furthermore object to the 



22 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE 

doctrine of the Trinity its inadequacy. It 
assumes to be a complete statement of the 
substance, or, if you will, of the personality 
of God; but it takes no note of Nature, — 
the all-present manifestation of God, — and 
compels the alternative, either to set aside 
Nature as Godless, or accept her as an inde- 
pendent God. 

The Unitarian reform was a needful protest 
against the confusion and polytheistic leaning of 
Trinitarian theology. But if Unitarianism were 
understood to deny the doctrine of Father, Son, 
and Spirit, or even to waive and ignore it as un- 
essential, then should I repudiate the name, re- 
nounce the connection, and desire that my name 
were expunged from the muster-roll of that com- 
munion. For this is of the very essence of Chris- 
tianity; and not only so, but indispensable to 
any right and worthy conception of Deity. Not 
an abstruse speculation is it, but a vital element 
of Christian experience. 

Other teachings of the gospel have been 
claimed as peculiar to the Christian dispensa- 
tion. Some, I think, — and notably the doctrine 
of grace, as enunciated by Paul, — may be fairly 
so regarded. But I know of none so distinctive, 
so constitutive as those which I have named. 



SPECIAL IN CHRISTIANITY. 23 

none of which it is so certain that they have no 
parallel in other systems. I emphasize, then, this 
supreme idiom of our religion, — Father, Son, 
and Spirit. Into this the Christian ages from of 
old have been baptized; in this name we all, as 
many of us as have received Christian baptism, 
have been united to the Church. In this con- 
fession the two great divisions of the Christian 
world, the Eastern and the Western, meet ; in this 
the various Protestant communions are one. The 
dogma of the Trinity confuses and divides, but 
this is common, this universal. In words which 
I have used elsewhere and here beg leave to 
repeat : " The belief in the Father, the Son, and 
the Holy Spirit embraces and oecumenizes Chris- 
tendom in one household of faith. We have in 
this tenet a God whose nature is neither diffracted 
by multiplicity nor yet concluded in singularity, 
who is neither the indifferent All of Pantheism 
nor the insulated Self of Judaism ; a God whose 
essence is not to be sought in lone seclusion, but 
in everlasting self-communication ; whose being 
is one and yet a process ; a constant reflection of 
himself in human nature ; a ceaseless inchurching 
of himself in human society."* 

* See " Christian Examiner " for March, 1860. 



24 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE 

Christianity, as now presented, is universal 
religion plus the doctrine of Father, Son, and 
Spirit. That doctrine, while it marks a dis- 
tinction between the gospel and other sys- 
tems, is not limitation, but enlargement of the 
ground which is common to all. ■ It extends 
the horizon of religious thought, and is there- 
fore an essential of free religion. For free 
religion does not consist in ecclesiastical in- 
difference, or heterogeneous association of dif- 
fering creeds, or in bold negations, but in 
breadth of view. 

Comparative religion is the order of the day; 
but let Christians, or inheritors of the Christian 
faith, who compare the systems and creeds of 
nations, beware lest, in their tenderness for other 
religions, in their anxiety to give those religions 
their due they fail to do justice to their own. 
Christians may or may not be better in the 
main than the subjects of other dispensations ; 
but, to him who rightly apprehends the scope 
of the gospel, there is in it that which, in 
height and breadth and depth, as far transcends 
the wisdom of other faiths as theirs transcends 
the wild idolatries which they displaced. That 
was a brave saying of Peter, that " God is 
no respecter of persons, but in every nation 



SPECIAL IN CHRISTIANITY. 25 

he that feareth him and worketh righteous- 
ness is accepted of him." Nevertheless, it 
needs to be added that, in quite a new and 
peculiar sense, "grace and truth came by Jesus 
Christ/' 



II. 

THE BIBLE. 

BY REV. JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE, D.D. 

u Who also hath made ns able ministers of the new testament, 
not of the letter, but of the spirit; for the letter killeth, but the 
spirit giveih life." — 2 Corinthians iii. 6. 

I AM to speak to you to-day of the Bible, and 
I propose to describe and contrast the old 
and new views of the Bible. I shall try to show 
you that the free, broad, and human views of the 
Bible long held by Unitarians are now largely 
accepted by scholars and thinkers of all de- 
nominations. I would also show that they are 
higher, nobler, more spiritual, more religious, 
than the old Orthodoxy. But before doing this, 
I will state the facts concerning the Bible in 
which all agree, — to which all scholars, whether 
Trinitarians or Unitarians, Orthodox or Hetero- 
dox, would assent. 

All, then, agree that the Bible is not one book, 
written at one time, and on one subject; but a 
whole encyclopaedia of religious literature. These 



28 THE BIBLE. 

books were written by at least forty different 
authors, and during a period of at least a thou- 
sand years. By whom they were first gathered 
together we do not know. At what time they 
came together Ave cannot tell. * On what princi- 
ple they were selected is a matter of conjecture. 
Who the real writers were is doubtful. Their 
manuscripts have long since perished. The old- 
est manuscript we have is three hundred years 
later than the time when the last book of the 
New Testament was written. Down to the time 
of the invention of printing, in the fifteenth cen- 
tury, the books of the Bible were copied by 
hand. The result was that a large number of 
errors crept in, and we have no means of deciding 
with certainty what the original text of the Bible 
was. Our present English version was made by 
order of King James I., and printed in 1611. 
Neither the translators were inspired, nor the 
printers, nor the proof-readers; nor did they pos- 
sess as good a Hebrew and Greek text from which 
to translate as we have now. 

These are simple matters of fact, to which all 
scholars will agree, no matter how orthodox 
they are. On the other hand, all — even the 
most heretical — whose opinions deserve any re- 
spect, will admit that the collection of Jewish 



THE BIBLE. 29 

and Christian works which we call the Bible 
stands at the head of the religious literature of 
the world. There is no book like it, or second 
to it. All the other sacred books of mankind, — 
the Vedas, the Kings, the Zend Avesta, the writ- 
ings of Confucius, the Koran, the Eddas, — how- 
ever much they may contain of sound truth and 
moral beauty, are flat and tame when compared 
to the depth, sweep, variety, picturesque character, 
and heavenly charm of the books of the Bible. 
The book of Job is probably the noblest poem in 
any literature ; the book of Ruth, by the testi- 
mony of such critics as Rousseau and Goethe, is 
the tenderest idyl ; the book of Eeclesiastes is 
more terrible in its desperate despair than any 
tragedy of .zEschylus or Shakspeare. The stories 
of patriarchal life in Genesis, and of antique man- 
ners in the books of Kings, surpass even the un- 
dying charm of those in Herodotus. The book 
of Psalms goes so deeply into the spiritual expe- 
riences of man's nature — his faith, his doubt, his 
reason, his hope, his tender trust, his ardent as- 
piration — that it will always remain the best 
manual of devotion for the human race. The 
prophetic literature of the Bible stands absolutely 
alone, making a class by itself in the productions 
of human genius. Those strains mount up into 



80 THE BIBLE. 

the sky like the larks on the plains of Normandy, 
who ascend higher and higher till they go out of 
sight in the heavens, while their notes still fill 
the air with music dropping from above. The 
writings of Paul contain occasional bursts of fiery 
eloquence, of tender affection, of concentrated 
thought, without a parallel in human writings. 
And the words of Jesus, preserved in the four 
Gospels, stand for ever alone. For in them we 
see a harmony of qualities everywhere else sepa- 
rate and divorced. They show us a reformer 
free to the verge of radicalism, yet a conservative 
unwilling that a jot of the old law should pass 
away until the good in it had been carried up 
to something better ; a philanthropist, in whose 
mind all barriers between man and man had fallen 
away; — one with a zeal so determined that he 
went directly to death as a martyr to the truth ; 
and with a charity so large that it included in its 
embrace all who wished to do the will of his 
Father in Heaven, however sunk in misery, sin, 
and shame ; a piety so high and so constant that 
it enabled him to say what no other saint or sage 
could ever dare to utter, " I and my Father are 
one." And all these powers of soul, heart, mind, 
are in such perfect harmony that not one of them 
is prominent, and that we never think of Jesus 



THE BIBLE. 31 

as reformer, philanthropist, saint, or martyr, but 
only as a divinely pure brother, teacher, and 
friend. Even the Roman Catholic Church has, 
we think, never ventured to say " Saint Jesus." 

The book which contains all this, and vastly 
more, is justly called "The Bible," or "The 
Book." There are two diametrically opposite 
views, however, taken of its origin, inspiration, 
and authority. One of these I call the theology 
of the spirit, and the other that of the letter. 

The theology of the letter says of the Bible 
that it is " the word of God" in such a sense that 
every part of it proceeded by direct revelation 
from God. It is a supernatural revelation of 
God's truth, containing every thing necessary, for 
the religious life of man ; for his happiness here, 
and Jlis hope hereafter. The writers were super- 
naturally and miraculously inspired, so that they 
could not make any mistake, and have not made 
any. There are no errors and no contradictions 
in the Bible. It is infallibly, verbally, literally 
true from end to end. All between its lids is the 
word of God. Its geology, astronomy, chronol- 
ogy, are perfect, and leave nothing to be desired. 
Its great men are all saints to be admired and 
imitated, their crimes excused and explained 
away. Its Jewish part and its Christian part are 



32 THE BIBLE. 

in exact and entire harmony ; and he who ques- 
tions or denies any thing in it is an infidel, who 
had better have never been born. 

This view of the infallibility of the letter of the 
Bible, — or, as it was once called, its " plenary 
inspiration," — is not so very ancient, after all. 
It came up, in its extreme form, since the Ref- 
ormation. Tholuck, the German theologian, a 
scholar highly esteemed in all orthodox circles, 
tells us, in his essay on Inspiration, that this doc- 
trine arose in the controversy with the Roman 
Church. The Jesuits said, " We, in our church, 
have unity, confidence, assurance. We have 
an outward infallible church to lean upon, — an 
outward authority to which all can appeal, an 
outward judge to decide all questions. You 
Protestants have no such authority ; nothing in- 
fallible, nothing sure. You have only your own 
inward emotions, different opinions, changing 
moods." Pressed by this argument, says Tho- 
luck, the Protestants came, by degrees, to main- 
tain that they also had an outward infallible 
authority, namely, the infallible letter of the 
Bible ; and at last were driven, by the heat of 
controversy, to assert that not only the sense of 
the Bible, but the words, the letters, the Hebrew 
vowel-points, and the very punctuation, proceeded 



THE BIBLE. 33 

directly from God ; and that the writers of the 
Bible were merely the amanuenses of the Holy 
Spirit, — the pen with which he wrote, the flute 
through which he breathed. 

Now I will call your attention to the fact that 
the writers of the Bible lay no claim to any such 
infallibility as this. They nowhere say that they 
were inspired to write books. Luke, for instance, 
gives his reason for writing his Gospel. He does 
not even say, like a modern Spiritualist, that "he 
wrote under influence," or that "his hand began 
to write by an irresistible power." He virtually 
says, just as you or I might say in the dedication 
to the biography of a friend, " Forasmuch as many 
have taken in hand to set forth in order a declara- 
tion of those things which are most surely believed 
among us, even as they ( who were eye-witnesses 
and servants of the word from the beginning) 
delivered them unto us, it seemed good to me, 
also, having had perfect understanding of all 
things from the very first, to write unto thee, in 
order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou might- 
est know the certainty of those things wherein 
thou hast been instructed." If Luke were con- 
scious of being divinely inspired to write an in- 
fallible book, would he have given such reasons as 
he does here ? He does not say, " You may be 
3 



34 THE BIBLE. 

certain of the truth of what I say because I am 
infallibly inspired to write ; " but, " You may be 
sure of the truth of what I say because I have 
known all about it from the beginning ; because 
I heard it from those who were eye-witnesses ; 
and so I thought it well to write this narrative." 

Two texts are quoted to prove this verbal in- 
spiration ; and, because thus perpetually quoted, 
we may presume that they are the strongest 
which can be found. One says that " Holy men 
of old spake as they were moved by the Holy 
Spirit." But it does not say that this made them 
infallible. Holy men now declare that they are 
moved by the Holy Spirit ; but they do not pro- 
fess to be infallible. The other text says that 
"All scripture is given by inspiration, and is 
profitable for doctrine, instruction, &c." Yes, 
profitable or useful; but that is surely not the 
same thing as infallible authority. These texts 
teach an inspiration which I also gladly accept ; 
they do not limit inspiration to the Jews or to 
the Bible ; they teach that all holy men and all 
sacred books come from God, and have more or 
less of his truth and power and goodness in them. 
Yes, " all scripture is given by inspiration ; " the 
scriptures of every race and every land; every 
sacred book which has tamed man's pride, taught 



THE BIBLE. 35 

him to look up and adore, instructed him to be 
just, humane, true, and generous. No such books 
come wholly from the will of man ; there is a di- 
vine element in them all, whether they are the 
Vedas of India, or the Koran, or the Dialogues 
of Plato, or Wordsworth's Ode to Immortality. 
For " Every good gift and perfect gift is from 
above, and cometh down from the Father of 
lights." 

There are many serious objections to this doc- 
trine of the infallible inspiration of the Bible, 
some of which I will now mention. 

To say that every statement in the Bible comes 
directly from God produces widespread unbelief. 
A large part of the scepticism and infidelity of 
the present time may be traced directly to this 
source. Men are taught, from a thousand pulpits, 
that they are not Christians unless they believe 
the Bible all true, from Genesis to Revelation. 
But they cannot believe this, therefore they think 
they are not Christians. The Bible says that the 
world was created in six days ; that by the gen- 
ealogies from Adam to Abraham, and Abraham 
to Christ, it was created less than six thousand 
years ago ; that the sun, moon, and stars were all 
created at that time ; that the visible universe, as 
well as the human race, has, therefore, existed 



36 THE BIBLE. 

only during that period. But geology shows us, 
by infallible documents, written on tables of 
stone, that the life of the earth, with that of in- 
numerable plants and animals, goes back for 
millions of years ; and astronomy proves that 
the light which we receive to-day from some 
distant stars left them hundreds of thousands of 
years ago. Anthropology shows us, by human 
bones and stone implements found in ancient 
strata, that man must have existed in long distant 
periods of time, far beyond the epoch ascribed 
to the creation of Adam. 

Now, when men are told that they must re- 
nounce the revelations of science and the truths 
of history, or they cannot be Christians, some 
will make, reluctantly, that sad renunciation. 
They will abdicate reason, put a bandage over 
their eyes, and refuse to see facts, and call this 
voluntary blindness faith. Others will, I think 
more nobly, prefer to be called infidels rather 
than to tell a lie for God, or profess to believe 
what they know to be false. I have had persons 
tell me that they were infidels because they could 
not believe that the whale swallowed Jonah, or 
that Joshua made the sun stand still. I assured 
them that in order to believe in Jesus Christ it 
was not necessary to believe in Jonah, or to have 



THE BIBLE. 37 

any opinions in regard to Joshua. Students of 
the Old and New Testament find many contra- 
dictions between different books. Look at any 
harmony of the four Gospels, and you will find 
the same story told differently by the different 
Evangelists. These contradictions are of no con- 
sequence at all ; do not diminish our confidence 
in the truth of the narrative; rather increase our 
sense of the honesty of the narrators; unless we 
adopt this theory of the infallibility of the record, 
and then they become fatal. They differ in de- 
tails, as human testimony will, but they agree in 
essentials. 

]STo one can tell how much misery has been 
caused in honest minds by this old doctrine of 
scripture infallibility. Some people are made 
with that sense of truth that they cannot shut 
their eyes to plain facts because they wish to ; 
cannot make themselves believe by pure will. 
They reverence the character and teachings of 
Jesus, and would gladly become his disciples, 
but do not dare to do so because they cannot 
accept as true what their reason tells them is 
false. To such as these the doctrine of the Bible 
which I am presently to unfold brings hope and 
healing. 

How many superstitions and cruelties have 



38 THE BIBLE. 

been sanctified by appeals to the letter of the 
Scriptures ! During many centuries, thousands 
of poor wretches were burned alive as witches, 
and this belief rested on the universal convic- 
tion of Catholics and Protestants that the Bible 
clearly taught the reality of witchcraft. A sin- 
gle bishop caused six hundred to be burned. A 
French judge, Remy, boasted that he had burned 
eight hundred witches. A thousand persons 
were executed for this offence in one year in the 
province of Como, in Italy. Catholic bishops 
and Protestant clergymen led the way. Luther 
said, u I would have no compassion on witches. 
I would burn them all." And all these horrors 
were triumphantly defended by the letter of the 
Bible. 

So, in our day, we have seen slavery defended, 
and despotism defended, by the letter of the 
Bible. Because Paul said, " Slaves, obey your 
masters," and "The powers that be are ordained 
of God," it was thought that God commanded 
men by Paul to submit to a despot like Nero, 
and ordered them to support a system which 
made of human beings chattels. So, too, to-day, 
single words of the Bible are quoted to defend 
the doctrine that God has made creatures certain 
to fall into sin, and then punishes them for that 



THE BIBLE. 39 

sin with endless torments. Such are the super- 
stitions, dishonorable to God, and bringing untold 
miseries on man, which have been maintained in 
the world by this view of the Scriptures. 

It has also brought about a confusion of Ju- 
daism and Christianity. The Old Testament, in 
some minds, has more authority than the New. 
In many pulpits Moses has greater influence than 
Christ. Men still keep the Jewish Sabbath 
which Christianity abolished. The Lord's day, 
intended to be a day of freedom and joy, has 
been made a day of gloom by calling it "the 
Sabbath," and onying: us Moses as our master to 
teach us what to do in it. Though all that 
Christ said or did in regard to it was such as to 
make him a Sabbath-breaker in Jewish eyes, 
men prefer the law of Moses on this point to his. 
To rest both the body and soul makes the 
Christian Sabbath ; whatever does that, whether 
it be a walk, a pleasant conversation, or an enter- 
taining book, is keeping the Sabbath ; whatever 
disturbs the soul with unrest, even if it be church- 
going, is Sabbath-breaking. The sacrificial wor- 
ship of the Jews, by which, from morning till 
evening, the great altar of the Temple ran with 
blood, has indeed been long abolished. But the 
influence of that system continues in the Catholic 



40 THE BIBLE. 

Church in the daily sacrifice of the Mass, and in 
the Protestant Church in the blood theology 
which teaches that God is unable to forgive sin 
except by bloodshed, and that by the blood of 
an innocent victim. The Apostles, who were 
Jews, accustomed to these perpetual sacrifices of 
the Temple, naturally said, " Christ is our sacri- 
fice." " He is our sin-offering." " It is his blood, 
not that of goats and sheep, which saves us." 
And so, literal theology builds on these natural 
Jewish expressions a whole theory of substituted 
suffering and vicarious sacrifice. 

Thus is the progress of thought arrested ; 
thus is unbelief created ; thus are we sent back 
from Christ to Moses by this Christian literal- 
ism. Thus we have a hard and dry theology, 
which studies the letter, broods over the text, 
and does not rise to the spirit of the Gospel. 
To " read the Bible," whether it is understood 
or not, has been made a Protestant sacrament. 
Men carry the Bible in their trunk, or keep it on 
the centre-table as a protecting charm, making 
the house safer ; or, at all events, more respect- 
able. It has been thought dangerous to make 
any corrections in the text, or the translation, 
though it is known that there are errors in both. 

The chief objection to all this doctrine of the 



THE BIBLE. 41 

verbal infallibility of the whole Bible is, that the 
spirit is chained down by the letter; that the 
living power of the words and soul of Jesus are 
neutralized and nullified by being tied to the 
dead body of old traditions which have long 
since lost their power. The strength of a chain 
is only that of its weakest link ; so by this doc- 
trine the power of the Bible is kept down to that 
of its poorest part. 

It is a dreadful thing to kill the life of the 
Gospel by low, literal interpretation. "The let- 
ter killeth," says Paul. It does so. 

The New Testament teaches, for example, a 
resurrection of soul and body; but this means 
ascent, progress, going up into a higher life of 
soul and a higher life of body. This is animat- 
ing and inspiring. The New Testament, accord- 
ing to the spirit, shows us perpetual resurrection 
— endless ascent and progress — heaven above 
heaven, world above world. It shows us innu- 
merable homes, adapted to all conditions of being ; 
infinite variety there, as there is infinite variety 
here; of life and joy; of beauty, order, wonder, 
magnificence; plenty to know, plenty to do, 
plenty to love. This is our future existence 
according to the spirit of the New Testament 
which ffives life. 



42 THE BIBLE. 

But the theology of the letter tells us, instead, 
of a resurrection of the same particles of an 
earthly body ; of that flesh and blood which (we 
are told) cannot inherit the kingdom of God ; of 
that corruptible matter which cannot see incor- 
ruption. The letter-theology says that these 
same poor, sickly bodies are to be gathered out 
of their graves, and then divided into two classes : 
one, of saints to go to heaven and sing psalms 
for ever; the other, of sinners to be sent to 
hell, there to blaspheme God for ever. Which 
of these is the most worthy view of the Infinite 
Being, Creator of all, Father of all, whose sun 
shines on the evil and good, and whose inex- 
haustible power and. love flow for ever through 
the universe? 

And because of these superstitions we have 
fierce attacks on the Bible, shallow criticisms on 
the Bible. When it is made the tyrant instead of 
the friend, violent reactions come. Some men go 
about the country denouncing the Bible, filled 
with an emotional reaction, and quite ignorant 
of the nobleness, freedom, emancipating power, 
and broad humanity of this wonderful volume. 
Others are filled with a critical reaction, and 
write books to point out an inconsistency here, 
or a contradiction there, laboring to reduce to 



THE BIBLE. 43 

a minimum our trust in these grand utterances 
of the ever-present spirit of God. Because, in 
their opinion, the Apostle John did not write the 
fourth Gospel, all its sweet and sacred words are 
declared to be insignificant. 

The theology of the spirit rises above all 
this level waste of dreary controversy. It re- 
gards the Bible as inspired, but not infallible ; 
inspired in a higher degree, by the same spirit 
which has also spoken to men in all the great 
scriptures of the race. It believes in the au- 
thority of the Bible, but it is the authority 
which truth always has over honest and candid 
minds. 

It does not think it essential to decide when 
the books of the Bible were written, nor by 
whom ; nor when they were collected and put 
together in the canon. The books remain the 
same, whoever wrote them ; by giving their au- 
thor another name you cannot rob them of a 
single note of power or of love. We are sure 
that the best books have remained, for they have 
been guarded by the love of mankind. They are 
not supernatural in any sense but that in which 
all our life is overflowed by something from above, 
all nature filled with a diviner beauty, and by 
which there is something of God in all the best 



44 THE BIBLE. 

things said and done by man. There is no truer 
word than that of Emerson : — 

" Out of the heart of Nature rolled 
The burden of the Bible old. 
The litanies of nations came, 
Like the volcano's tongue of flame, 
Up from the burning core below, 
The canticles of love and woe." 

I would believe more in divine inspiration 
than the old doctrine allows, not less. That 
teaches an occasional influx from God, coming 
and then going away ; making a few prophets in 
a certain land and race, but nowhere else. 1 
believe in "the prophets who have been since 
the world began," in a God "who has never left 
himself without a witness in the world," in a 
light " which lightens every man who comes into 
the world." The old doctrine of inspiration is 
like a theory of water which should only tell us 
of the deluge, when it rained forty days and 
forty nights, and when the waters covered the 
earth. The new doctrine is like the other view 
of water which describes its perpetual descent in 
dews by night, in showers by day, — in winter 
snow and tropical storms, — making the whole 
earth glad and full of life. "For as the rain 
cometh down and the snow from heaven, and 



THE BIBLE. 45 

watereth the earth, making it bring forth seed to 
the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my 
word be that proceedeth out of my mouth, saith 
the Lord." 

It may be said, "If we know so little about 
the origin of the Bible and how it came to- 
gether, how can we be sure that we have the 
right books in it, and not the wrong ones?" 
There is a principle which applies in literature 
as well as in science, called "The survival of 
the fittest." The best writings are preserved 
by the love of mankind, — the poor ones perish. 
Many of the books of the Old Testament are 
lost. The present books appeal to them as 
authority, — quote the "Book of Iddo the Seer" 
and the " Book of Jasher," &c. But it is not 
probable that we have lost much in losing them. 
We see something of the New Testament in the 
process of formation. Eusebius, about 325, tells 
us of three classes of books, — those generally 
accepted, those generally rejected, those ac- 
cepted by some and not by others. One of 
the books which has now dropped out entirely 
was in all the manuscripts of the New Tes- 
tament till the fourth century. This was the 
Epistle of Barnabas. 

The Greatness of the Bible does not consist 



46 THE BIBLE. 

in the tame monotony of one uniform revelation, 
the same tcachino; in the book of Kin^s as the 
Gospel of John; but in the very opposite, in a 
variety which meets every temper of the mind, 
every phase of life, every tone of earthly expe- 
rience. There are hours of dark despair when, 
of all the books of the Bible, only Ecclesiastes 
is welcome as an adequate expression of that 
black mood of the soul. There are hours of bold 
questioning, when we call on the heaven above 
and the earth beneath to explain the awful enig- 
mas of human life. And if then, in our most 
audacious flight of thought, w^e open the book of 
Job, we find a bolder reason than our own, one 
which casts aside all pious phrases and demands 
to know the exact truth, the whole truth, and 
nothing but the truth, whether God is thereby 
vindicated or not. 

None have done more injustice to the inex- 
haustible volume of inspiration in the Bible 
than the long series of theologians who have 
made it their one end to put the Bible into the 
press of their system, and to force every part 
to conform to every other part. Those who 
find the doctrine of the Trinity in the three 
angels of the book of Genesis, the doctrine of 
total depravity in the sad wail of Jeremiah over 



THE BIBLE. 47 

the sins of his time ; who see Anselm's doctrine 
of atonement typified in the Jewish scape-goat, 
and the Christian resurrection indicated in Job's 
desperate cry to God to come and vindicate him 
in the flesh on earth, — such theologians have 
done their best to squeeze the life out of the 
Bible, and make it as small and tame as their 
own shallow minds. 

How much nobler is Dean Stanley, who speaks 
thus of the book of Esther: — 

k 'It is expedient for us that there should be 
one book in the Bible which omits the name of 
God altogether, to prevent us from attaching 
to the mere name a reverence which belongs only 
to the reality. . . . The name of God is not 
there, but the work of God is." " Let those who 
cling to the authority of every book in the Bible 
be warned by this not to make a man an offender 
for a word, or the omission of a word. When 
Esther nerved herself to enter, at the risk of her 
life, the presence of Ahasuerus, C I will go in unto 
the king, and if I perish, I perish,' — when her pa- 
triotism uttered itself in the noble cry, ' How can 
I endure to see the evil that shall come upon my 
people ? how can I endure to see the destruction 
of my kindred?' — she then expressed, though 
she never named the name of God, a religious 



48 THE BIBLE. 

devotion as acceptable to him as that of Moses 
and David, who no less sincerely had the sacred 
name always on their lips." 

Thus speaks Dean Stanley, and adds that 
Esther in this is the Cordelia of the Bible, the 
sister who refuses to use words of praise to her 
father, but acts her gratitude in her life. 

" Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least ; 
Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds 
Reverberate no hollowness." 

I wish the Bible to be more loved and hon- 
ored than it is now, not less. I wish it more a 
source of faith and hope than now ; to bring us 
nearer to God than it now does ; to make Christ 
more interesting, and more of a true Teacher, 
Master, and Friend. The better we understand 
it, the more shall we revere it ; not with a blind 
homage, but with an intelligent admiration. The 
more freely that we use our reason, separating 
the chaff from the wheat, the more will the genu- 
ine power and beauty of the Bible be made man- 
ifest. God, who has given the Bible, has also 
given us our reason with which to examine and 
understand it, and we are guilty before him if we 
bury this talent in the earth and hide our Lord's 
money. 

If we preach a free and rational Christianity, 



THE BIBLE. 49 

let us do it in order to make men more religions, 
not less so. Teach them that God loves his 
children in all worlds; that if they are punished 
for sin, here or hereafter, it is that they may be 
made better; that God desires even the wicked 
to be as happy as they are capable of being; 
tli at suffering will be found at last to be the 
means of greater good ; that we can begin now 
to love God, trust in him and serve him ; that 
to serve him is to do good to our fellow-men; 
that true religion is not belief, but life: not 
creed, but conduct; that, since God has made 
us, he must have put something good in all of us, 
and that we ought to cultivate whatever in us is 
good, and so put down the evil; that God is 
always near us, an all-surrounding love, ready to 
help, inspire, and strengthen us ; that true religion 
must be in accordance with reason, at harmony 
with science, art, and literature ; that there can 
be no war between God's oldest revelation of 
himself in nature and what he* teaches by in- 
spired men. Teach men to see God in all things, 
— in the stars and the rocks, the ocean storms 
and the tropic calm ; in the infant's smile and 
the mild evening of a good man's life. Thus 
shall we oppose best the progress of unbelief and 
irreligion, and of that moral death which consists 
4 



50 THE BIBLE. 

in living without God in the world. Let us not 
be afraid of doubt, for truth can never die. In- 
stead of thinking too much of death and hereafter^ 
let us make a heaven here below by faithful lives, 
and leave our future to God in perfect submis- 
sion and entire trust. 



III. 

GOD. 

BY REV. ANDREW P. PEABODY, D.D. 
M God, even the Father." — James iii. 9. 

DID it ever occur to you how absolutely 
numberless must have been the patterns 
of all variable fabrics of human art and skill, — ■ 
carpets, wall-papers, porcelain, details of finish 
in furniture, fashions of jewelry? Every year 
brings its avalanche of novelties, and yet there 
is no repetition ; nor will there be, if the world 
should last as many centuries as it has lasted 
years, and should the civilization of its latter 
days demand the same sort of fabrics that we 
use. If you will suppose that a pattern-maker 
has at his command a straight line, four or five 
different curves, and three or four tints, the 
combinations that he might make of some or 
all of these simple elements are more numerous 
than man ever had the patience to calculate or 
to write ; and with every added line or tint 



52 GOD. 

the figures that would express the combinations 
vastly exceed the preceding number, and increase 
so rapidly, that, with the curves and colors to be 
found, for instance, in what would be called a 
very plain carpet, they would far surpass the 
number of atoms in the solar system ; for these 
are given in figures by the latest physical phi- 
losophy, while the possible patterns of which 1 
have spoken transcend the scope of human arith- 
metic. 

How easy, then, you might say, must be the 
inventor's task! No, not so, by any means; for 
while there are myriads of combinations that 
might please the eye and satisfy the taste, there 
are myriads of myriads that would be unsightly. 
Were you or I, untrained, to make the experi- 
ment, we might continue trying it for a lifetime, 
and for a score of lives, if they were given us, 
before we could hit upon a pattern that would 
be barely passable; for there would be millions 
of chances of failure to one of success. All this 
pattern-making is the result, not of happy chance, 
but of educated taste, trained eye, and practised 
hand. 

The universe happened out of chaos, say cer- 
tain (so-called) philosophers. In the swirl of 
eddying atoms, some impinged upon others, and 



GOD. 53 

became entangled with them. Thus were formed 
pairs, clusters, groups of atoms, which somehow 
blundered into life. By happy successions of 
chances, a portion of them attained higher modes 
of vitality. By still more happy chances, there 
grew up in some of them intelligence, reason, 
will, love, superstition, religion ; and at length, 
after countless ages, by the masterly handless 
throw of an unloaded die came forth the supreme 
wisdom that can emancipate itself from religion, 
and rejoice in a w r orld without a God, — this 
last chance, it seems to me, the strangest of all, 
against which I should have rated the probabil- 
ities as millions to one. 

The hypothesis of a godless world carries 
absurdity on its very front. There are some 
sixty elementary substances in our earth and 
its atmosphere. Were you to belt the solar 
system with figures, you could not express the 
number of possible combinations of two or more 
of these elements. But immeasurably the greater 
part of these combinations would be of elements 
mutually incompatible, neutralizing, destructive, 
— many of them, against which chance could 
not guard, such as would make extensive havoc 
where there were the beginnings of organic life 
and development. Suppose these elements fer- 



54 GOD. 

meriting in an ungoverned chaos, the utmost 
that we can conceive would be, here and there, 
now and then, a combination that might seem 
to have a future, but sure to be speedily whelmed 
by or in some clustering of uncongenial elements 
that could only restore to the seething abyss what 
had barely emerged from it. 

But what do we see? In the first place, a 
world stocked with organisms and inorganic 
compounds, each of which, to say the least, bears 
as clear indications of intelligent purpose as any 
pattern that ever came from human hands, — 
each of which has its seeming reason for being, 
in its capacity of enjoying or giving enjoyment, 
or in perfectly definable uses, adaptations, or re- 
lations. Nor do we find any combinations that 
look as if they had merely happened, — that have 
no reason for being, no place among the rest, 
no service to render or to receive. In a chance- 
world such could not be the case. Even were 
there in such a world any congruous combi- 
nations, the haphazard and incongruous com- 
binations would vastly outnumber the others ; 
for the number of them that are possible im- 
measurably exceeds that of the others. 

But this is not all. Suppose it possible that 
chaos should, by the accumulation of happy 



GOD. 55 

chances through unnumbered aeons, have been 
resolved into combinations that could hold, to- 
gether, there is an improbability which figures 
are inadequate to represent that any considerable 
number of these combinations would harmonize 
with one another, so as to be sub-systems of 
larger systems; and a still stronger improbability 
that these larger systems would be so correlated 
as to make a cosmos, an orderly whole, with 
all its parts mutually consistent, auxiliary, com- 
plementary. Yet this is what we see in our 
planet, — combinations in no sense dependent 
on one another, connected by no causative re- 
lation, yet perfectly adapted to one another, 
supplying to one another what each might seem 
to lack, — even their apparent or brief discords 
resolving themselves into interludes or staccatos 
in the grand diapason in which all created things 
bear part in the universal harmony. And this a 
chance world ! with more myriads of probabilities 
against it than there are sands on the sea-shore, 
or drops of water in the ocean. 

But this is not all. Astronomers have made 
their calculations as to the probability that 
various identities, proportions, and law T s of the 
planetary orbits, distances, and motions hap- 
pened by chance ; they give an intensely strong 



56 GOD. 

numerical probability against each of these har- 
monies as the result of chance ; and these num- 
bers must all be multiplied together into a sum 
beyond conception, to represent the number of 
probabilities against' one, that all these harmonies 
could have existed otherwise than by creative or 
co-ordinating mind, will, purpose. 

Nor yet is this all. The same calculus has 
been extended — though, ot course, in such vast 
spaces and distances, but imperfectly and ten- 
tatively — into the stellar universe, to the binary 
stars, the drift of stars in space, and various 
phenomena that are gradually finding record in 
the observatories of Europe and America, — all 
indicating harmonies, against untold probabilities 
to the contrary, were the universe self-formed 
and self-governed. 

Now, in view of these harmonies, multiplied 
beyond our count to our familiar view, and ex- 
tending to the utmost limits of telescopic vision, 
even if I had not the faintest religious feeling, 
or the feeblest craving for a God, my arithmetic 
and logic would compel me, however reluctantly, 
to believe in a Supreme Intelligence, all-wise, 
omnipotent. I should be an idiot to doubt it. 
Even did I say, in the perversity of a depraved 
heart, " There is no God, " my mind would give 



GOD. 57 

the lie to my heart; my reason would constrain 
my faith. The conception of the Being mirrored 
alike in the rose-leaf or the insect's wing, and in 
the majestic courses of the heavens, is indeed, at 
best, faint, feeble, inadequate, — least adequate 
when most vivid. How, then, can we set limits 
to our gratitude to Him, that he has shown as 
much of himself as we need to know in One who 
bears his image, in a form human and divine, 
revealed while veiled in a life on the same earthly 
plane on which we dwell, — in One equally our 
Lord and our brother, offering himself at once 
to our familiar contemplation and love, and to 
our adoring reverence and admiration ! 

The testimony of nature to its Author being 
thus clear and strong, it is not surprising that a 
very large proportion of the foremost scientific 
men have been believers — many of them devout 
believers — in God. The late John Stuart Mill, 
who inherited atheism from his father, in his 
posthumous Essays admits that there are in 
the universe so many evidences of design, plan, 
purpose, as to render the supposition of an intel- 
ligent Creator at least probable. He thinks, too, 
that there are manifest tokens of benevolence in 
the Creator; but is inclined to ascribe to him 
something less than omnipotence. He had not, 



58 GOD. 

and has not, says Mill, entire control of the 
material with, by, and upon which he works. 
Hence the existence of Evil, which could not 
exist under the government of a being both 
almighty and perfectly benevolent. Let us at- 
tempt the problem of Evil, which has baffled 
the philosophy of many centuries ; for, without 
some approximate solution of this problem, while 
our reasoning from design remains impregnable, 
and we should believe in God, we could not, with 
any comfortable assurance, say, with St. James 
in our text, " God, even the Father." If evil is 
beyond God's control, existing in spite of him 
and in contravention of his purpose, though we 
might be constrained to say, " Hallowed be thy 
name," and u Forgive us our trespasses," we 
could not add, "Deliver us from evil;" and a 
God who cannot save his creatures from, or 
through, or by evil cannot be their Father. 

In approaching this problem I would say at 
the outset that, if it admits of perfect solution 
(as it undoubtedly does), still we must not ex- 
pect any solution of ours to be entire and perfect. 
The limitation of our faculties and the narrow 
range of our observation and experience, both 
in space and in time, would preclude this. God 
alone can fully interpret God. 



GOD. 59 

This premised, let us understand clearly what 
is implied in omnipotence. When we say that 
all things are possible with God, we except 
things that are in their very nature impossible. 
He cannot make two and two five. He cannot 
endow that which is intrinsically w r rong with the 
characteristics of the right. He cannot make 
veracity, integrity, or purity sinful. Now it may 
be that there are certain ends, in themselves de- 
sirable, which as paramount ends are by nature 
and of necessity incompatible with one another ; 
that of two valuable ends one can be pursued 
only by subordinating and sometimes sacrificing 
the other; and that in such a case omnipotence, 
even under the direction of infinite love, must 
hold the lower end in abeyance, or suffer it to 
fail, for the sake of the higher. * 

Let us, in our inquiry, consider, first, what may 
be necessary for the development of certain 
traits of character, not expressly moral, yet fur- 
nishing the surest holding-ground for consistent 
and persistent moral principle; namely, skill, 
prowess, enterprise, hardihood of nerve and spirit, 
— in fine, all that constitutes robust, energetic, 
and progressive manhood. So far as we can trace 
the seeds and the germinating stages of charac- 
ter, Eden would have been the poorest possible 



60 GOD. 

nursery for these traits. Its denizens could have 
been little better than Sybarites. The writer 
of Genesis gave expression to a profound philo- 
sophical truth, when he said that God cursed 
the ground, that is, made it unfruitful, for man's 
sake ; for in whatever necessitates labor, man is 
the beneficiary. Now which is the more digni- 
fied, worthy, desirable condition, — that of physi- 
cal ease and enjoyment, or that of conflict with 
stubborn, yet not intractable elements, with seem- 
ing evils that may by man's agency be trans- 
formed into goods, with laws and forces of nature, 
at first adverse, yet capable of being disarmed 
or utilized by science, art, resolute purpose, 
and energetic action ? There can be but one 
answer. 

Still farther, so far as mere happiness is con- 
cerned, the balance is decidedly in favor of the 
vigor, courage, and perseverance that contend 
with nature, and against the quiescent state of 
mere luxurious ease. Who has not felt this? 
Whence the charm of athletic sports, of arduous 
explorations, of perilous adventures? How is it 
that so many who are born and bred in affluence, 
and have no need of toil for their subsistence, 
choose modes of life fraught with labor, exposure, 
hardship, and danger? Whence the Kanes, the 



GOD. 61 

Franklins, the Livingstones? This type of char- 
acter could be developed only by what are called 
physical evils; and these evils can be encoun- 
tered, surmounted, subdued, by intense and per- 
severing effort, while without it they remain in 
full force. It is worthy of emphatic notice in 
this connection that nature presents no insuper- 
able difficulties, no incurable evils, no obstacles 
insurmountable to human endeavor; and, also, 
that these adverse elements of our condition 
cannot be encountered once for all, but, when 
subdued, can be kept subject and serviceable only 
by a continuance of the enterprise and energy 
that first did battle with them. In point of fact, 
these evils do gradually yield to man. Many for- 
mer objects of peril and dread have already been 
made harmless. The process is going on with 
many others. It is impossible to say, for instance, 
what immense accessions of security by land and 
sea will attend the growth of the still infant 
science of meteorology. In fine, when we take 
into view what has been already effected in this 
and many other departments, Ave may antici- 
pate a condition in which man's control over 
nature will be almost entire and supreme, yet one 
in which a decline in those qualities that made 
him victor would unhang the trophies of his 



62 GOD. 

conquest, and render him again the slave and 
victim of the elemental forces. 

Now, if physical evil is essential to the forma- 
tion and growth of these noble qualities in 
man, we may well adopt, in an altered sense, 
the words which Milton puts into the mouth 
of the arch-fiend, and say, "Evil, be thou my 
good ! " and may thus regard this entire aspect 
of nature as attesting only omnipotent wisdom 
and love. 

As regards moral evil, a parallel course of 
thought is obviously just. We can conceive of 
a race of intelligent beings, capable of amiable 
and devout affections and of good deeds, yet 
not subject to temptation or susceptible of evil. 
But is not this a type of character immeasurably 
beneath that arduous and enterprising virtue 
which first subdues, spurns, surmounts evil in its 
own person, and then wages war with it in and 
for surrounding society and the human race ? In 
the ordinary conception of heaven and its native 
dwellers, can the highest archangel, whose path 
was never crossed by the shadow of wrong, pos- 
sess any thing that merits the name of goodness, 
as compared with the sacramental host on earth, 
patriots, reformers, philanthropists, prophets, 
apostles, martyrs, — men who, from the success- 



GOD. 63 

ful warfare within, have gone forth to stem 
the current of iniquity, — have yielded up sub- 
stance, reputation, life, to raise the fallen, to 
reclaim the lost, to conquer whole provinces 
of humanity for truth and right, for Christ 
and God? 

Moreover, have not these men a purer hap- 
piness, a higher joy, than a heaven of repose 
and monotonous worship could give? Look 
at St. Paul, breasting every peril, beaten, set 
in the stocks, imprisoned, driven from city 
to city, yet when in the grasp of the terrible 
Nero, and anticipating speedy death on the 
cross or in the amphitheatre, not only calm and 
self-possessed, but triumphant, jubilant, calling 
on his fellow-Christans to joy and rejoice with 
him. 

Now, if these higher forms of character could, 
in the very nature of things, be produced only by 
conflict with moral evil, then is the sufferance of 
moral evil not only consistent with, but a neces- 
sary consequence of, the omnipotent love of God. 
Freedom of volition is, indeed, a perilous gift. 
It was, perhaps, impossible that it could be con- 
ferred on any race of finite beings, without 
their working out for themselves the disastrous 
moral experiments which have defaced the whole 



64 GOD. 

history of man thus far. It may be that more 
direct interposition to annul the consequences of 
moral evil, or to prevent its hereditary transmis- 
sion, would have generated recklessness, and 
produced more wrong than it could remedy. 
Moreover, while we anticipate, with the growth 
of Christian civilization, a more virtuous future, 
it may well be that the maintenance of that 
better condition will still demand and nurture 
the same energy and potency of goodness that 
will have been needed to actualize it. All this 
is at least probable from our point of view; and 
it presents the only solution of the mystery of 
evil consistent with just inferences as to the Di- 
vine character derived from the whole structure 
and course of nature. 

But we must not forget that there are in 
human experience numerous sufferings, calami- 
ties, prolonged and accumulated depressions and 
misfortunes, which have no offset of moral bene- 
fit, and no earthly relief or compensation ; and 
that there are unnumbered instances of depravity 
in which there is no clear consciousness of the 
wrong or possibility of the right, yet in which 
retribution falls with its full weight of distress, 
agony, and torment. This is the night-side of 
humanity, on which rests not a straggling light- 



GOD. 65 

beam from our lower sphere. Yet even this is 
suffused with rays from the Saviour's broken 
sepulchre. Immortality philosophy conjectures, 
Christ proclaims. The suffering and sin of 
which I have spoken are inevitably incident to 
the physical and moral evil from which grows 
all that is noblest and best in human character. 
It is at least conceivable — it is strange that any 
Christian should regard it as less than certain — 
that for these innocent victims of evil there will 
be an awakening from the death-slumber to an 
eternity of privilege and happiness. What will 
the sufferings of this earthly life then be to 
them? What the troubled visions of the night 
are, when " joy cometh in the morning." Nay 
more, there may be a divine alchemy by which 
remembrances of earthly privation and suffering 
may be transmuted into the elements of higher 
felicity, it may be even into those pure affections, 
desires, and aims which, whether on earth or in 
heaven, are the staple of all intense and enduring 

Without attempting to look farther between 
the leaves of the book which we cannot open, let 
me say that eternity is the adequate interpreter 
of the mysteries of time, not because it enables us 
to solve them all, but because it contains infinite 
5 



66 GOD. 

possibilities of solution. At the same time, it ac- 
counts for the existence of these mysteries. If 
there be immortal life, then we here see only the 
small beginnings of things, — too minute a por- 
tion of the curve for us to determine its equa- 
tion, — infinitesimals which we have not the means 
of inteoratino;. 

If the problem of evil admits, as we have seen 
that it does, of approximate solution, there re- 
mains no cloud upon the Divine benevolence ; 
for there are in the constitution and order of 
nature unnumbered tokens of kind design, of 
beneficent purpose, — unnumbered provisions 
which have no possible meaning but the comfort, 
welfare, and happiness of man and of other orders 
of sentient beings ; and if evil can be or seem to 
be the means of higher and more enduring good, 
we have the concurrent testimony of the mate- 
rial and spiritual universe to the perfect benig- 
nity of its Author. But God the Father implies 
even more than this, — not merely a wise and 
kind providence, but tenderness, sympathy, and 
affection for each individual human being. The 
father enters lovingly into all that can make the 
child happy, — not only into the grave concerns 
and emergencies of his life, but into its daily cur- 
rent, its festive aspects, its sport, laughter, and 



GOD. 67 

frolic, — takes a genial interest in all its little 
joys, solicitudes, and sorrows, with a readiness to 
enhance every pleasure, to lighten every burden, 
to soothe every grief. All this is implied in the 
Divine fatherhood. God's fatherhood, like man's, 
must include even the emotional recognition of 
the child's spiritual well-being or ill-being. — re- 
gret for his unworthiness, joy in his repentance, 
his resistance to temptation, his growth in good- 
ness. Nor let us shrink from ascribing emotion to 
the Infinite Being. As the sea-swell is type and 
token of the ocean's vastness and grandeur, so is 
the pulse-beat of a love intense and tender far 
beyond our experience and thought an inexpres- 
sibly more adequate conception of the Supreme 
Being than the icy repose so often associated 
with his image. 

Let us remember that it is by the inbreathing: 
of his own spirit that there are awakened in our 
hearts the home-loves that are full of unutterable 
joy ; that they gain strength by all our commun- 
ion with him ; that the nearer we approach 
him, the dearer is our affection for those whom 
he has given to us ; and that in man nothing 
seems so godlike as the self-forgetting love of 
the greatly good, — their intense fellow-feeling 
with infancy in its innocent gladness, with child- 



68 GOD. 

hood in its glee, with youth in its sinless mirth 
and gayety. 

Nor let us forget that the father loves not only 
the child that deserves his love, but, if possible, 
even more, though regretfully and agonizingly, 
the wayward, disobedient, profligate child, — un- 
wearied in his efforts to reclaim him, watching for 
the faintest tokens of better promise, forgiving to 
the uttermost when the child returns to duty 
and virtue. Here we have precisely the type of 
the Divine fatherhood as portrayed by Jesus. In 
his parable, it was the child who had ruined him- 
self by vice, and had wallowed with the swine 
i.i vilest infamy, that said, " I will arise and go 
to my father;" and it was such a child that 
the father ran forth to meet, fell upon his neck 
with kisses, held high festival for him, and made 
the whole house ring with music and dancing. 
A fathers or a mother's undying love has often 
won back the else hopelessly lost child ; and were 
the Divine fatherhood, instead of being so often 
spoken of as the prerogative of the good alone, 
represented and felt as unchanged and ever 
genial for the worthless and abandoned sinner, — 
were it felt that the heart that throbs w^ith the 
gladness and the grief of a sentient universe 
sorrows for his waywardness, and would have 



GOD. 69 

a new joy in his reformation, — would not this 
thought awaken sincere penitence in many a 
soul which terror cannot move, and which is 
perhaps hardened in guilt because it believes 
itself rejected, even hated, by God no less than 
by man ? 

Let, then, the title of God as a Father be held, 
not as a cold, heartless theological formula, but 
as a real, vital, home-coming truth, — one which 
we can best interpret from our own most inti- 
mate consciousness. God is such a father as we 
have known in our experience as children, as we 
have yearned to be to our own children, only 
that all that we have thus felt is to his father- 
hood as the lambent tongue of flame is to the 
perennial fire from which it darts. 

Xor let it seem unworthy of our conception of 
the Infinite Creator that he should be in sym- 
pathy with our small concerns, and humble needs, 
and paltry pleasures, — that he who dwells in the 
far-off heavens should yet be unspeakably near 
to the lowly, trusting heart. Of types of this 
wonderful truth the whole world is full. The 
little wayside flower has a life that is closely 
intertwined with all that is great and glorious in 
the universe. The vast forces of nature are its 
satellites and servants. The sun unfolds and 



70 GOD. 

paints its petals. The starry night sheds its dew 
upon it. The winds of heaven are its reapers 
and its sowers. The revolving spheres mark the 
cycle of its growth. Much more, then, shall not 
the soul of man, frail and feeble indeed, yet with 
the power of an immortal being, have its life- 
roots, its nurture, its refuge, its hope, in the vast, 
the grand, the infinite, yea, in Him whose being 
transcends space, time, and thought? What 
more, then, does the Divine Teacher than to give 
voice to nature's unwritten word, when, pointing 
to the lilies on the mountain-side, he says, " Shall 
he not much more care for you?" 

Let me close with a still more emphatic refer- 
ence to Jesus as the revealer of the Divine 
fatherhood. " He that hath seen me hath seen 
the Father," says our Lord. Mark, " the Father," 
— not a second person of a tripartite or a triune 
God, but the Father, whom the popular theology 
has so separated from Jesus in their respective 
relations to man, that by no possibility could 
either represent the other. God, as a father, 
could be fully manifested on earth and among 
men. His omnipotence and omniscience can be 
shared by no finite being. There can be but one 
Almighty, but one All-wise, in the universe. But 
fatherhood - — perfect love and tenderness, the 



GOD. 71 

perpetual outgoing of kind thought, and faithful 
care, and offices of mercy, the yearning affection 
which can never count the lost as wholly lost, and 
which bestows only the more abundant effort and 
sacrifice where there is the deepest need — may 
have its abode in the finite spirit no less than in 
the one Infinite Being, may be incarnate on the 
earth, may dwell among men, and they may 
behold its ineffable beauty and glory. It has 
dwelt in all its fulness, its divineness, its unsur- 
passable perfectness, in One, and but one, in a 
human form. Its path on earth was thick-sow r n 
with benefits for man. It won the clinging em- 
brace of innocent childhood. It spurned not the 
touch of the loathsome leper. It whelmed with 
unhoped forgiveness the despised and rejected 
of men. It sent the maniac from his lair among 
the tombs, to gladden his household. The dead 
heard its voice and lived, and the cry went forth, 
"God hath visited and redeemed his people." 
On the cross it breathed only intercessions and 
blessings. In death it was too strong to die, and 
slept in the grave only that there might grow 
from it the perennial spring-flowers of the res- 
urrection. 

All this Christ was and is ; and in this he is 
the Emmanuel, the God with us, the God in 



72 GOD. 

man, the Father in the Son in whom is the entire 
fulness of his love, " God in Christ, reconciling 
the world unto himself." His fulness we have 
all seen in its faithful record ; and we all must feel 
it, if we will only read that record with the 
inward eye, and give it heart-room, — yes, room 
and a home in our hearts for Him who so often 
in his mission of love had not where to lay his 
head. 

What, then, is our Christian doctrine of God ? 
Nature reveals him by innumerable tokens which 
admit of no interpretation except that of an 
omnipotent and all-wise Creator. Evil resolves 
itself into a ministry for the higher good of those 
in conflict with it. The Gospel proclaims more 
than benevolence, — a fatherhood, of which the 
parental love of human experience, as it is the 
outflow, is but the type and shadow. This 
fatherhood Jesus manifests in his life, in his 
death, in his new birth from the sepulchre to the 
life eternal. 

Be ours not alone the tribute of our sanctuary 
worship, not alone our distant, awe-stricken rev- 
erence, but more, and most of all, the fervent 
adoration of a child's heart, the glad consecra- 
tion of a child's faithful obedience and service, — 
an obedience which will make us almoners of all 



GOD. 73 

that comes to us from our Father's love, — a 
service in which we must needs be the followers 
of Him who showed himself most divine in that 
he went about doing good. 



IV. 

JESUS CHRIST. 

BY REV. BROOKE HERFORD. 
" The life was the light of men" — St. John i. 4. 

OF all the objects of religious thought there 
is none on which I so rejoice to speak to you 
as on Jesus Christ. We may differ from other 
churches as to what exactly was that unique per- 
sonality; but we all alike look to him as, above 
all others, the Teacher, and, in the surpassing 
greatness of his help to mankind, the Saviour. 
In all the problem of religion, Christ is the 
chiefest factor. If you would work out that prob- 
lem from the human side, in Christ you have 
humanity at its highest religious power. If we 
think that the problem is to be worked out from 
the divine side, still, of all lives and words in 
which we find the manifestation of the divine, 
Christ is the highest and clearest. Morally and 
religiously, he stands at the head of our race. 
With him began what Dr. Martineau well calls 
" a new edition of human nature ; " and, for eigh- 



76 JESUS CUBIST. 

teen centuries now, the world's best life has kept 
referring itself buck to him as its originating 
and sustaining influence. 

There is something in all this which would 
make the person and the work of Christ always 
interesting, even as a mere historical study. But 
it is something far greater than an historical study. 
The work of Christ, as I hope to show you, is 
-still going on ; and the power of that work still 
lies, as it has ever done, in reverential disciple- 
ship to his person, to that word. and spirit and 
life which constitute the Christ of the Gospels. 

And now if I should describe in brief what 
it is that our Unitarian Churches stand for in 
regard to what one may call the person of Christ, 
I cannot put it in any better words than those 
which I have just used, — "the Christ of the 
Gospels." That which the Gospels are full of 
is a Life, — a life of wonderful holiness and good- 
ness. To after ages, that life seemed so wonder- 
ful, so above any level of human living, that it 
became the great controversy of Christendom 
what it really was ; and the Orthodox explana- 
tion came to be that Jesus Christ was, in reality, 
Almighty God. Now we cannot receive that 
explanation. We believe it is a mistake. But 
what we specially stand for is not some other 



JESUS CHRIST. 77 

explanation of our own. As a fact, our explana- 
tions are various, and some Unitarians frankly 
own that it is beyond their explaining. But 
what we want is to go back of these explana- 
tions and definitions which make up the Christ 
of the creeds, back to the life itself, — -the Christ 
of the Gospels. That is where we lay the em- 
phasis. In the Gospels, we believe that we get 
back the very nearest that we can to Christ 
as he really lived among men, and as he seemed 
to those who actually listened to his voice and 
looked up into his face. It was that life which 
set Christianity going in the world. In that 
Christ of the Gospels resides the central, undying 
power of Christianity. 

A great question, however, meets us on the 
threshold. When I speak of the Christ of the 
Gospels as that which we should study and tie to, 
I am at once asked, "Is there really enough 
known to us about Christ's life and thought for 
us to tie to ? " There is a wide-spread impression 
abroad that modern Biblical criticism has cut 
away the very ground of any permanent disciple- 
ship to Christ by showing that the accounts we 
have are not historical ; that all the clear outlines 
of that figure which the world has bowed down 
to are mythical or legendary ; that the whole is 



78 JESUS CHRIST. 

a half imaginary picture, — nothing to depend 
upon in it, nothing discernible enough to stand 
for. 

This is an utter mistake, however. What 
criticism has really done is this : it has cleared 
away the idea that the four Gospels are inspired 
and infallible narratives ; but it has not touched 
this fact : that those four Gospels, taken simply 
as you would take any other accounts of any other 
ancient life, give us such a picture of the life and 
spirit and word of Jesus as we have of no other 
life in all the ancient world ! Take the extremest 
criticism even : suppose that not one of our four 
Gospels was actually written by those immediate 
followers of Christ whose names they bear ; that 
it was some generations before the story of Jesus 
was thus written down at all. This does not af- 
fect the main facts. It does not affect the historic 
reality of that great figure which left such an 
impress on those around that even for so long, 
though unrecorded, it kept itself in mind so clearly 
and distinctly. Fortunately, we know exactly in 
what direction to allow for the effect of such a 
lapse of time and for the accretions of tradition. 
That was put fairly and clearly by John Stuart 
Mill, who looked at the whole matter simply as 
an outsider, certainly with no predisposition to 



JUS US CHRIST. 79 

find more in the Gospels than there really is. 
"The tradition of followers, " he says, "suffices 
to insert any number of marvels, and may have 
inserted all the miracles. . . . But who among 
his disciples, or among their proselytes, was cap- 
able of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, 
or of imagining the life and character revealed in 
the Gospels?" Exactly. Every exaggeration of 
Christ by the world must have been in the direc- 
tion of the world's ideals of greatness; but then 
every one of those ideals of greatness, alike 
among Jew and Gentile, was quite different from 
that which the Gospels actually present to us. 
Judaism might have invented a grand Messianic 
figure ; the Gentile world might have invented 
a warrior-patriot or a philosopher; and either 
Jewish or Gentile followers may have toned up 
the actual Christ-life in either of these direc- 
tions : but neither Jewish nor Gentile enthusiasm 
was capable of inventing or of evolving that 
actual Jesus of Xazareth who went right in 
the teeth of both, whose life and death alike were 
a disappointment to the Jew and an absurdity 
to the Gentile. Nay, you see how the idealizing 
tendency did work. It gradually glorified Jesus 
into that grand celestial Christ, that mighty di- 
vine being which, as I shall show you by and by, 



80 JESUS CHRIST. 

the creeds expounded. Fortunately, they were 
so busy exaggerating in this direction that the 
human life of Jesus was hardly meddled with at 
all. That was not the line alon^ which exa^o-era- 
tion was going on. So that there is good reason 
to accept that human life as, in all its main feat- 
ures, true ; and the figure of Jesus stands out 
untouched by criticism, — "a unique figure, " as 
Mill calls him, and "in the very first rank of 
the men of sublime genius of whom our race can 
boast." 

What a figure, what a life, that is, of which 
the Gospels are full ! If you only read them 
casually, still it is an impression, very distinct in 
its way, that they leave upon you, — the impres- 
sion of a life glowing with a strange, close con- 
sciousness of God, and, in the impulse of this, 
going about doing good with beautiful, tender 
loving-kindness, and constantly, on the way, 
letting fall teachings of deep wisdom about the 
heavenly Father, and duty, and life. 

When you go near, when you look carefully 
into the Gospels, the features of all this keeping 
take form more and more vividly. You see that 
life as it came out into the public view, and went 
about from place to place for a few brief years, 
and then passed away. You see the surround- 



JESUS CHRIST. 81 

ings of that life, which gave it its form: — 
that Jewish people, the Puritans and irreconcil- 
ables of the ancient world, looking with inten- 
sity of longing for a great political Messiah ; 
misreading the old prophecies of the triumph of 
the Jewish faith into predictions of the triumph 
of Jewish power, and losing all the light and 
blessing of that old faith in the eager waiting 
for a mighty conquering deliverer. And among 
them rises up one who says : "My people, come 
unto me ! The Lord has put his spirit upon me, 
hath anointed me — made me his 'Messiah,' 
or anointed one — to preach to you that his 
kingdom is at hand, and to call you to believe 
the good tidings, and to enter into it ! " But the 
kingdom that he preached was not a successful 
Jewish revolution, but simply the drawing of all 
men together into brotherhood with one another, 
and childlike love to the great Father, and into 
earnest, dutiful life, and the loving even of their 
enemies! What a wonderful thought to come 
with such possessing power into the soul of one 
who to the people about was just Jesus, the car- 
penter's son, of a little Galilean village ! People 
sometimes try to make out that Christ was simply 
the product of his time. No : you cannot get 
Christ that way ! The very master-thought 
6 



82 JESUS CHRIST. 

of his life was the very opposite to the great 
thought of his time, rose clear above it. 

With that great, tender thought swelling within 
him, he went forth among his people, preaching 
this kingdom of God, that wanted no revolt, no 
bloodshed ; that waited for no great national 
opportunity ; that was right " at hand," open 
to every one, rich or poor, the Gentile or the 
Samaritan as well as to the Jew, — to every 
one who would believe it, and repent and enter 
in; yea, which was even something "within." 
This was God's message which was upon him, and 
which he wanted to tell as glad tidings to cheer 
the sorrowful, to save the lost, and to make all 
men happier and better. He cared not how he 
lived, nor where, so that he could gather people 
around him to tell them of it, or touch with its 
healing power some sorrowful or sin-bound heart. 
He loves to go much among the homes of poor 
men like himself ; but he sits down at the Phar- 
isee's table as readily, or goes with his new 
disciple, Matthew, to where a company of the 
shunned and hated tax-gatherers had come to- 
gether to see him. People did not understand 
it. "This man a prophet!" said the Pharisees. 
"Why, he goes eating and drinking just like 
any common man ; and eats with the unclean, 



j£sus cueist. 83 

too ! " But Jesus weut right on. At marriage 
festivals, at rich men's feasts, he might be seen 
one day; the next, wandering in lonely places, 
with only the crust that his disciples had saved 
from yesterday, and the fishing-boat or the 
mountain-side the only place where he could 
lay his head ; and ever full of the tenderest 
sympathy, weeping with those that wept, taking 
up little children in his arms to bless them, pity- 
ing the leper from whom all others shrank away, 
and full of great thoughts, and words that have 
been living, glowing words ever since. Some- 
times those thoughts and words came forth in 
great discourses to the listening multitude, like 
that grand charter of simple, practical, spiritual 
religion, the Sermon on the Mount ; sometimes 
they flashed out upon those who tried him with 
their questions ; sometimes they broke in upon 
the petty bickerings and jealousies which went 
on in undertones around him ; and, oftenest of 
all, they shaped themselves into some home-spun 
parable, in which he held the mirror up to nature, 
and made men teach themselves. 

u And the common people heard him gladly." 
They do not seem ever for a moment to have 
given up their old hope of a great national leader, 
but they hoped that Jesus would by and by throw 



84 JESUS CHRIST. 

off this disguise of a lowly teacher, and come out 
in the character they looked for. So they gave 
themselves up to the delight of his wise, kind, 
beautiful teachings. Very touching is it to see 
how they flocked about him ! When the news 
spread that Jesus of Nazareth was in the neigh- 
borhood, the farmer left his farm, the laborers 
came out from the cornfields and the vineyards ; 
the mother forgot her household cares, and, 
snatching up her little child, set off, with others 
holding by her skirts, eager to have the prophet 
say a word of blessing for her little one ; the 
cripple hobbled off after the rest, blind men 
begged the passers-by to lead them, even the 
village children left their play, and hurried along. 
And so they came about him, and sometimes 
almost trod each other down in their eagerness 
to get within the range of his voice or the touch 
of his garment. 

And so he went on to the end. He never 
swerved from his preaching of that great spiritual 
blessing for all men, which he wanted to substitute 
for the old Messianic dream of his people. Once, 
at least, the people tried to force him to fulfil 
that dream, — w T ould have taken him by force 
and made him king ; but he only went right 
away, — hid himself from them. And thus came 



JESUS CHRIST. 85 

ever a little cooling of the popular feeling; and 
meanwhile the priestly party, who had hated him 
from the beginning, grew bolder in their attacks. 
Still he went straight on, — straight on, though- 
apparently his mission had failed, — straight on, 
though it led right to his death ! And so, with 
a great anguish for the people he had longed to 
save, and could not, with a great pleading of 
prayer for some other way, if it might be the 
Father's will, but with a faith that was over all, 
he took up that cross in which the light of 
his great love for man was focussed to its most 
touching and imperishable brightness. 

This is the Christ of the Gospels; — only the 
barest sketch of that grent life, only the outline 
of those moral and spiritual features of it which 
no criticism can touch, and yet, still, what a 
life it is ! I do not wonder that men have puz- 
zled over it. I do not wonder that, when the 
story of it spread among heathen peoples who were 
familiar with the idea of incarnations and demi- 
gods, the thought grew up and gathered strength, 
"This must have been God!" But the whole 
history of the way that idea grew, and the very 
kind of creed-making to which it turned the 
Church, and the results which have followed those 
creeds through the ages, make me sure that it was 



86 JESUS CHRIST. 

all a mistake. I am convinced that, the more men 
study Christ's life as it was, the more they will 
come back to his simple humanity, — humanity 
• plus God's spirit, indeed, but plus God's spirit 
in a way which did not make him God in any 
sense whatever. And, after all, in saying that 
men will come back to Christ's simple humanity 
the more they study his life, what is this but 
saying that his life will make upon them simply 
the same impression that it did actually make 
upon those who were spectators and companions 
of it ? Here is the one thing which, it seems to me, 
there is no getting over : that Christ-life, — which, 
on the reading of it, our Orthodox friends think 
must surely have been the life of God, — to those 
who actually witnessed it, who saw it at its bright- 
est, never suggested any such idea. It was all 
an after-thought. Even those who believe that 
he really was God generally admit that those 
who were all about him were not aware of it. 
To them he was simply " Jesus, the Prophet of 
Nazareth." Why, even such a writer as William 
Ewart Gladstone, one of the fairest scholars of 
our time, — an Orthodox Episcopalian, too, who 
believes from other sources that Christ was God, 
— frankly admits that, according to the gospel ac- 
counts, Jesus appeared to those about him simply 



JES'US CHRIST. 87 

as a man. He sftys : u It appears on the whole, 
.as respects the person of our Lord, that its ordi- 
nary exhibition to ordinary hearers and specta- 
tors was tli at of a man engaged in the best and 
holiest ministries, . . . and teaching, too, the best 
and holiest lessons, and claiming unequivocally, 
and without appeal, a divine authority for what 
he said and did ; but, beyond this, asserting re- 
specting himself nothing, and leaving himself to 
be freely judged by his words and deeds." True, 
he thinks it was only because of the hardness 
and dulness of the time that Christ did not fully 
reveal himself; but the important thing is the 
fact explained that those about Jesus did not 
know any thing about his being God during his 
life. And it is evident it was so. It does not 
depend upon a few texts : the whole account of 
how those about him regarded him and treated 
him shows it. You find his own family thinking 
him "beside himself" even for setting himself 
up as the Messiah ; and they go out "to lay hold 
on him" (St. Mark iii. 21). Evidently, the dis- 
ciples had no idea of his being God, or Judas 
could never have betrayed him, nor Peter denied 
him, nor the rest forsaken him. Evidently, the 
Jews had not, or they never could have crucified 
him. No; and we have this curious corrobora- 



88 JESUS CHMST. 

tion of the idea of his deity having come after- 
ward : that, a few centuries later, when it had 
come, one of the points which we constantly find 
theologians setting themselves to explain is, Why 
such a grand truth had not been made known 
during his life? Even Athanasius says, — and 
this was the common explanation, — " All the 
Jews were so firmly persuaded that their Messiah 
was to be nothing more than a man like them- 
selves, that the apostles were obliged to us^ great 
caution in divulging the doctrine of the proper 
divinity of Christ." Some of those old fathers 
gave a more curious explanation, as, e. g., Ignatius, 
who said that it was kept secret that the devil 
might not know it; and subsequent writers took 
up the idea, and argued that, if the devil had 
known it, he would have taken care not to put it 
into the heads of the Jews to crucify Jesus, and 
so w r ould have spoiled the plan of salvation. 
Here, again, the explanation matters little ; but 
the fact for which such explanations were set up is 
most significant. It is a fact which there seems 
to me no getting over. For, see: that very life, 
which seems, as we read of it, so far above ordi- 
nary human life that after ages thought the idea 
of a hidden Godhead necessary to account for it, 
— that life, to those who actually witnessed it, 



JESUS CHRIST. 89 

who saw its very reality and glory, never sug- 
gested any such thought. 

But then I am told it was revealed afterwards. 
I want to know when. Because it was such a 
stupendous fact ; so stupendous, it must have 
been, when it first came really upon his followers, 
that this Jesus with whom they had been going 
about was verily Almighty God ; and so stupendous 
to the Jews, so utterly contrary to all their pre- 
conceived ideas. If it were indeed so, and if 
this great news of Christ having been God was 
to be henceforth, as it has been represented, the 
one thing which it is most important for Chris- 
tians to believe, then all the more we must expect 
to find it very clearly and emphatically pro- 
claimed. 

Yet do we find it so ? Why, look at the great 
occasions which have been recorded for us, on 
which the apostles gave, not some passing allusion 
to the gospel, but a great, marked, emphatic 
proclamation of it. On all those occasions they 
speak of their Master, but how ? Take that great 
preaching on the day of Pentecost (Acts ii.). It 
is simply "Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved 
of God among you." Take that solemn setting 
forth of Christ by Paul at Antioch, occupying 
nearly a whole chapter (Acts xiii.), and how 



90 JESUS CHRIST. 

does that long address wind up ? " Be it known 
unto you, therefore, men and brethren, that 
through this man is preached unto you the 
forgiveness of sins." Listen to Paul, as, at Athens, 
he stands before the philosophers. There was 
nothing in their minds to make " great caution " 
necessary : there was every reason why, if Christ 
were God, he should have so proclaimed him ; 
nay, the very way was opened by his having 
found that " altar to the unknown God." But 
that u unknown God " whom he declared to them 
was simply the one Almighty ; and, when he comes 
to speak of Christ, it is simply to say that the 
Almighty "hnth appointed a day in which he 
will judge the world by that man whom he hath 
ordained." Now this is surely a remarkable fact. 
Can you set a few passing expressions here and 
there in Paul's letters and expressions, all of 
which are more or less doubtful, against the 
entire absence of any hint of Christ's deity on 
these great and marked occasions ? 

Again, there is another class of occasions on 
which, if Christ were God, it could hardly help 
appearing unmistakably. I mean, when the dis- 
ciples have to speak of what are called the 
"offices" of Christ. Sometimes they call him 
"the Judge," sometimes the " Mediator," some- 



JESUS CHRIST. 91 

times the " Ransom," sometimes as one through 
whom they have "forgiveness of sins." Now 
a strong point is usually made that Jesus could 
only fulfil such offices through the fact of his 
being divine. The explanation is, that there 
were two natures in him, — a human nature, by 
which he was " Son of man," and a divine, which 
made him the " Son of God." If that were so, 
surely we might expect to find some trace of this 
distinction in the New Testament; for instance, 
that, while the ordinary life he shared w T ith 
humanity should be alluded to in connection 
with the name "man," or "Son of man," these 
more exalted offices should be ascribed to him as 
" Son of God." But, if you look, you find no 
trace of any such distinction. When Paul has 
to speak of him as the mighty Judge, it is simply, 
" He will judge the world by that man whom he 
hath ordained ; " when he declares the forgiveness 
of sins, it is, " Through this man is preached unto 
you the forgiveness of sins." It is especially 
as Mediator and Ransom that our Orthodox 
brethren, utterly misunderstanding the sense in 
which Christ was so, claim that nothing less than 
God to mediate and save would be of any use; 
and yet, on the one occasion when Paul speaks 
of Christ as having done this, how does he speak 



92 JESUS CHRIST. 

of him ? " There is one mediator between God 
and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave him- 
self a ransom for all" (1 Tim. ii. 5). I do not 
say that these expressions prove that Jesus was 
only man ; but when you never find them mak- 
ing that solemn and surprising announcement 
that Christ was God any part of their greatest 
and most formal proclamations of the gospel, 
and when you find them speaking of the highest 
aspects and elements in his great work simply 
in connection with his humanity, and when it 
appears that the doctrine of his deity, said to 
be the most important thing of all, is never 
directly and clearly asserted at all, but only 
inferred from occasional expressions, we are 
surely justified in regarding it as an after- 
thought, the joint result of glorifying reverence 
and theosophic speculations. 

But is this idea of Christ being man, then, 
all, it may be said ? Yes : as to nature, I be- 
lieve it is ; but man, plus such fullest inflowing 
and indwelling of the divine spirit, as surely 
lifted him above all others. The divine life and 
the human life are always in contact, and in many 
a different degree, — from that felt nearness which 
in prayer we call " communion," to that over- 
mastering uplifting and teaching which in prophet- 



JESUS CHRIST. 93 

souls we call " inspiration." I give you only my 
own thought now ; for, as 1 have said, Unitarian- 
ism leaves all these as open questions to be studied, 
but not dogmatized upon : but to me it seems 
that in Christ we have this contact and com- 
munion at its highest, divinest point. It is in 
this that I find the secret at once of those ex- 
pressions of Christ's consciousness of close, won- 
derful life with God, and also of the fact that he 
uses the very same expressions about his disciples, 
to teach them to seek for the same thing. Does 
he claim, " The words that I speak unto you, I 
speak not of myself"? Hear him, also, as he 
encourages his followers to look to God for the 
word to speak; "for," he says, "it is not ye that 
speak, but the spirit of your Father that speaketh 
in you." Does he speak of the spirit of the 
Father that dwelleth in himself ? He says also 
to them, " He dwelleth with you, and shall 
be in you." Does he utter that sublimest 
word of all, — "I and my Father are one"? 
Listen to him in his prayer, and he is asking 
that it may be so with his disciples, too : " That 
they may be one, even as we are one ; I in them, 
and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in 
one." Do I misunderstand all this way of speaking? 
Yet this is the very way in which Christ's own 



94 JUS US CHRIST. 

apostles understood it all : they found in the ex- 
altation of their Master's life the token of what all 
Christian life might aspire to. Why, what a word 
is that which Paul uses about Christ, — "In him 
dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily"! 
We cooler-blooded modern Christians are inclined 
to say, That is a word about Jesus that never could 
be said about man! And so we might have 
thought, only that we find the very same idea 
applied by Paul to the Ephesians ; for he writes 
to them the ecstatic wish, "That ye might be 
filled with all the fulness of God." No : we do 
not profess to be able to understand every word 
that Christ says about his close life with God. 
It is not likely we should. We must come far 
nearer to God ourselves first. But this one 
thing seems to stand out broad and clear on the 
face of the New Testament : that, in Christ's 
close, near life with God, just as much as in his 
tender, loving life with man, he was " leaving us 
an example." This also is part of that helpful, 
encouraging life which pleads with us in the 
Gospels, and helps man onwards and upwards to 
that true human life which is the very essence 
of salvation. 

And now, if I have succeeded at all in bring- 
ing out the touching, impressive power of this 



JESUS CUBIST. 95 

Jesus Christ, ns he stands for us in the Gospels, 
you will more readily receive what I have now 
to say about his work. For it will not seem to 
you any small thing — any lessening of his work 
— to say that we regard Christ's work as entirely 
a moral and religious work, an influence in human 
hearts. We have no part whatever in that idea, 
so strongly insisted on by some of our Orthodox 
friends, of Christ having died as man's substitute ; 
of his death on the cross having, as it were, 
bought mankind off from hell; of his "blood" 
being something to shelter behind from the wrath 
of God. All that seems to us a shocking per- 
version of the beautiful work which Christ lived 
and died to do. And no such work was needed. 
God never needed any reconciling. It was to 
turn man to God, not God to man, that Christ 
lived and died. God never needed any such "sat- 
isfaction." The only thing which can give God 
satisfaction is that his children leave off sinning, 
and try to do better. Christ's whole blessed 
work was simply towards this, in human hearts : 
to show men the infinite love of God waiting: 
for their repentance ; to help them to feel the 
awfulness of sin to put a new love of goodness 
and kindness into them ; to make mankind hap- 
pier and better ; to set the great realities of 



96 JESUS CHRIST. 

God's will and man's duty and destiny in the 
clearest light, and on an immovable foundation. 

All this is what he did, and what his spirit and 
word are still doing with a strange, undying power. 
That image of Christ, simply as he was, apart 
from nny explanation of him with the thought 
of his loving, merciful life, and of the things he 
spoke to men about, — has altogether taken a curi- 
ous hold on mankind. Through long ages, during 
which all that the churches held up before men's 
gaze was the great theological Christ, glorified 
in heaven, still the thought of the lowly Jesus, 
as he went about doing good on earth, never died 
quite out, — still lived on, with a curious power 
for good. When it seemed sometimes as if the 
Christian Church had nothing of Christ left in 
it but the name, that name, quietly standing for 
what it ought to mean, was the strength of every 
reformer. That name of Christ, the fact of the 
Church being based on Christ, has really been 
the one perpetually saving and renewing power 
of Christianity. Wherever you find men going 
back, not to what Wesley preached or Calvin 
taught, or to what the councils decreed or the 
fathers wrote, nor even to what the apostles laid 
down, but to what Jesus Christ himself was and 
said, you are sure to find them coming back to 



JESUS CHRIST. 97 

broad and simple faith, and to kindly practical 
life. And Christ is still helping men to such life 
all the time. His word and spirit are a help to 
all kindly feeling among men, a rebuke to all 
anger and selfishness, to all shows and shams and 
pretences ; and even those who most think that 
they reject Christianity, still speak, almost all of 
them, with deep veneration of the personal Jesus 
Christ. 

There is more than this, however, in Christ. 
A merely beautiful character would hardly have 
given him that place of leadership in the world's 
best religious life wmich has been his. But, con- 
nected with that life, are great, world-wide, im- 
perishable ideas and principles. In teaching that 
God is the heavenly Father of all; that all men 
are brothers, bound to brotherly duty and kind- 
ness; and, that the service of religion is not in 
this or that form of worship, but in duty and 
kindness and simple piety of heart, — in teaching 
these things, Jesus touched a universal religion. 
Never mind whether these things were entirely 
new things or not, — probably, indeed certainly, 
not entirely new, — but he brought them out 
with a clearness, with a simplicity, and with a 
power with which they had never been put 
before ; and in so doing even though they were 
7 



98 JESUS CUEIST. 

old stones he used, he did lay them as a "foun- 
dation," — put man's religion upon a broader, 
stronger, surer basis than ever before. 

Let us look for a moment at that comparison 
which Paul uses: a "foundation;" for I think 
it touches very closely on the point of the para- 
mount help which Christ is to the religious lite 
of mankind. When we talk of laying a founda- 
tion for a building, what Ave want is something 
level, strong, that we can build upon. That 
foundation which you try to get is not the ulti- 
mate basis, is not the bottom of all. Underneath 
are all the depths of the earth-strata, of all 
sorts of various density and cohesion, from mere 
quicksand to solid rock. But you do not want 
to dig right clown to the earth's centre every 
time a house is wanted to work in or live in. 
You lay a foundation near the surface, — a foun- 
dation of great massive stones; these are really 
only parts of the earth's substance ; but you 
bring them together and set them, broadly based 
arid levelled ; and there you stand, and your 
building stands, if it is good building. Now, 
it is very much the same thing that we want in 
our religious life. The real ultimate basis of all 
religion, is, the very nature of man, — that ten- 
den cv towards religion, that sense of divine and 



J£SUS CHRIST. 99 

spiritual realities, which seems inwoven with the 
very texture of mankind's life and thinking. 
You find this religious nature everywhere, just 
as the earth is under you everywhere. As a 
philosophical matter, I believe that religion rests 
perfectly securely upon this ; in the large, world- 
wide fact of it, always has grown up out of this, 

— always will. But still, for the practical build- 
ing of your thoughts or mine about religion, we 
want the foundation making a little more definite. 
That religious consciousness of mankind, like the 
earth-strata, is of very various consistency, and 
not easy to build upon. We cannot for ever be re- 
ferring back to the universal consciousness of man, 
and arguing up from first principles of thought 
and faith. For a deep theological inquiry, mine 
down to the very depths of human nature ; but, 
for your daily living thought, you want something 
more practicable. And it is just this which we 
have in the spirit and word of Christ. In Christ, 
the general religious nature of man came to its 
broadest, highest, strongest. It does not matter 
how. It does not matter whether you regard 
that Christ-life as the finest flower of human 
spiritual development, or as the brightest in- 
coming of divine inspiration ; there the fact is, 

— a consciousness of divine realities in Christ; 



100 JESUS CHRfST. 

a sense of God's fatherliness, nearness, love ; a 
sense of the immortal spirit-life in man ; a dis- 
cernment of the principles of human duty, a 
clear seeing of the innermost truth about life, 
such as had never been in the world before, and 
never have been since. Christ believed it was 
his great mission from God to teach men all this ; 
and he did teach it and live it, with a simplicity, 
with a clearness, and with an intense certainty 
and authority, which have made religion, as he 
so taught and lived it, a clearer, stronger, broader 
thing to man ever since. The great fundamental 
realities of religious thought and human duty 
have been upon a different footing since Christ 
came from what they ever were before. It is 
true that men have overlaid them with all sorts 
of though t-building and creed-building and form- 
building, which have had to come down. True; 
but there has ever been, in this simple Christ of 
the New Testament, the old foundation to refer to. 
And, as I said at first, all through the ages, when- 
ever men have referred back to that, — dug down 
through their ecclesiastical superstructions to 
what Christ was and what Christ said, — they 
have always kept coming back to the broad, 
simple realities of religion. 

And there is a value and help in this which 



JESUS CHRIST. 101 

ages have not weakened. I think it is as truly 
a help for us to-day as it ever was in the past. 
There are times when we have to dig right down 
into the ultimate facts of human nature, to see 
what even Christ rests upon ; but from all such 
deeper investigations, — from all looking abroad 
among the religious thoughts of the world's 
many peoples, and other great religions, and 
great teachers, — I always come back with a 
strengthened and confirmed sense of how, in 
the spirit and word of Christ, the realities of 
religion are laid in a broad, immovable foun- 
dation, on which I can stand and feel that I am 
on the very rock. Amidst all the systems with 
which the churches bewilder me, amidst all the 
mazes of the theology which the ages have built 
up, amidst all the perplexities of this at once 
speculative and questioning age, I always feel 
that, if I can get my foot upon some great, un- 
mistakable thought of Christ himself, I can stand 
there. I am upon a sort of divine common 
sense, winch stands from age to age, solid and 
plain and strong. 

And I want you, further, to notice that this help 
which we have from Christ, in the subject of 
religion, is only the counterpart of the help which 
we frankly acknowledge and rest upon in various 



102 JESUS CHRIST. 

other parts of life. In every branch of study, 
of thought, of action, there is such a thing as 
going right down to abstract first principles; 
but we do not practically do it. We do it now 
and then for a philosophical investigation per- 
haps, but not for the practical purposes of life. 
In every branch of study or action, what we prac- 
tically do, is, to accept some strong, broad, clear 
foundation which we find already laid long ago, 
by some great thinker of the past ; and we build 
on that. In every branch there has been thus 
some strong, massive foundation laid. What is the 
practical foundation on which political economy 
has been built? Adam Smith's great work, " The 
Wealth of Nations." Who laid the foundation of 
all this infinitely varied modern science, that with 
microscope and note-book goes up and down the 
earth, observing facts, and from them generalizing 
laws? Every one acquainted with the history of 
thought at once answers, ■" Lord Bacon." See, 
I can give you an instance closer still. What is 
the " foundation that has been laid " in geometry ? 
That little work, over which I suppose most of 
us puzzled when at school, — puzzled until the 
beauty of its great principles dawned on us like 
a revelation, — that little work, "Euclid." What 
is it ? That is the book which from before the 



JESUS CHRIST. 103 

time of Christ has been the practical founda- 
tion of geometrical study. It is simply the 
work of a man named Euclid, who, some three 
hundred years before Christ, was one of the pro- 
fessors in the great schools of Alexandria. So 
close is the parallel : you could imagine some 
admiring student of that old mathematician 
writing, in Paul's very phrase, " Other foundation 
of mathematics can no man lay than that is laid, 
which is this work of Euclid." It would have 
seemed very presumptuous, no doubt; but see, it 
has turned out to be the fact ! That work has 
stood as the one sure foundation of geometrical 
study for nearly three centuries longer than 
Christianity ; and it is standing yet ! It is 
men's practical starting-point, in that matter. 
When they can set their feet on a " Q. E. D." of 
Euclid, they look no further : they feel they are 
about on the rock. And all students feel that 
the world owes a marvellous debt of gratitude 
to that old Egyptian teacher, who, though it was 
no new truth he was laying down, but simply 
some of the everlasting relations of things, yet 
so unveiled those everlasting relations, so put 
them in a simple way evident to all, that ever 
since they have been one of the steady lights of 
man. 



104 JESUS CHRIST. 

When you think of that, it may not seem quite 
so absurd as some would regard it, that we should 
still have to look for the great broad foundation 
of our religious thinking, almost, though not 
quite, as far back. It is a far higher subject, that 
of this vague, mysterious life of ours and its 
invisible qualities and relations, than that of the 
mere relations of squares and circles: and its 
wisdom depends on a different set of perceptions. 
But yet Christ has set the great, broad realities of 
faith and duty in that same clear light, on that 
same solid foundation, as the Old World mathema- 
tician set the relations of lines and squares and 
circles. The great truths of the Sermon on the 
Mount are as universally accepted as Euclid's 
axioms! The meaning of the parable of the 
Good Samaritan is as certain as that of the forty- 
seventh proposition — and a great deal plainer! 

Nor am I speaking of this as a mere theoreti- 
cal help. It is a most practical one. It is just 
the very help we all of us want, in the weakness 
and uncertainty of our own personal discerning. 
I suppose there are hours when God and duty and 
immortality seem clear and real to our hearts. 
We feel them for ourselves. We do not need 
any one, not even Christ, to show them to us. 
Perhaps, if we could fix our hearts into that 



JESUS CUEIST. 105 

frame of settled faith, we should not need any 
helper, least of all need to look back so far for 
one. But we cannot so fix our hearts. There 
come other times when all seems dim and uncer- 
tain to us. Cold shades of doubt are over us ; 
sometimes the mist of sin and sinful feeling 
hides every thing from us. Which is the truth, 
which corresponds to the reality? — the happy 
faith of the brighter hours, or this closed in 
blindness and vacuity of our darker ? Those are 
the experiences in which I, for one, feel it an un- 
speakable help to be able to fall back upon that 
great word of life which we have in Jesus Christ. 
When all is dark about my own life, there always 
seems light there. I do not say that we have there 
all that man's ever onward thought needs. I 
do not pretend to find there ready-made answers 
to all the questionings of life. Christ is not the 
whole building, but he is the foundation. Amid 
the speculations of the schools, amid the totter- 
ing structures of the creeds, amid all the dimness 
and wavering of our personal faith, here is solid 
ground. Here are the great fundamentals of 
duty and faith, the thought of God, the hope of 
everlasting life, put into words of matchless sim- 
plicity and force, and wrought into the changeless 
likeness of earth's most perfect life. That "life," 



106 JESUS CHRIST. 

is " the light of men." And still along the cen- 
turies comes borne to us his pleading call, — not 
to adore him, but to follow him : " Come unto 
me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I 
will give you rest." And still, in our true hours, 
when we see clearest through the maze of care 
or doubt, our hearts cry back to him : " Lord, to 
whom else should we go ? Thou hast the words 
of eternal life." 



V. 
MAN. 

BY REV. GEORGE W. BRIGGS, D.D. 

"And when he came to himself, he said, I ivill arise and go to 
my father." — Luke xv. 17, 18. 

COMING to oar subject not as the partisans 
of a sect, but as seekers after truth, what 
affirmations can we make respecting human na- 
ture? In the study of the nature of man, we 
must first scrutinize its manifestations in human 
character. All science deduces its theories from 
materials gained by observation. The student 
listens to the teachings of Nature herself in the 
appearances and facts of the universe, and thus 
discovers the laws which they illustrate and re- 
veal. Follow the same method here. Observe the 
moral developments of humanity just as they are. 
Open the Book of Life; unloose its seals. At 
once, we are struck, appalled, by the terrible con- 
trasts recorded upon its pages. It is not all glory, 
it is not all shame, but a confused, perplexing 
mingling of both. Here are generosity and 



108 MAN. 

meanness, truth and falsehood, honesty and fraud, 
heroism and cowardice, set over against each 
other in all life and history. Look at individual 
men, and you see generous and selfish feelings 
displacing each other upon their faces, and 
threads of good and evil mingled in the warp and 
woof of character. Look into the world, and you 
find homes that are gardens of joy, lighted up 
by a love that rejoices to live, and even to die 
for the child ; and homes that are hells, in which 
fathers, mothers, living only for their own brutal 
appetite and passion, leave the child in naked- 
ness and starvation. Go into crowded cities, and 
shrines of prayer are side by side with the haunts 
of the tempter, and cross-bearing towers over- 
shadow dens of infamy. The incorruptible men 
and the villains, seducers plotting devilish wiles 
to lure innocence into ruin, and redeemers 
devising means to save, walk the same streets. 
Every creation of fiction has its hero and its 
villain, presenting both aspects of humanity, 
finding the original of both pictures in actual 
life. Into what opposite realms of life humanity 
sinks or soars ! With what dramatic power these 
contrasts are forced upon us in our own experi- 
ence ! I have heard of two men born and nur- 
tured in the same town in my native State, who 



MAN. 109 

breathed the same air and looked upon the same 
beauty of field and shore and sea. One plunged 
into crime, and in early manhood was doomed 
as a pirate to the scaffold. The other wooed 
truth with loving heart, and poured out his inspi- 
ration in an eloquence that entranced listening 
souls on both sides of the ocean ; and, being dead, 
is living and speaking still. It is like the con- 
trast between Judas and John. Plow often the 
grandest deeds are written on the same page 
with the basest ! When lately a noble steam- 
ship suddenly sank, and some in the cowardice 
of selfish fear deserted or thrust back the perish- 
ing, the hero-captain, forgetting self in saving 
others, stood at his post, and went down with his 
ship into the devouring sea. Sometimes the 
grandest qualities suddenly blaze out in lives that 
have seemed basest. A pilot, reckless, licentious 
on the shore, holds the helm of the burning 
vessel, like a martyr at the stake, till his arms 
shrivel, and he perishes in his endeavor to guide 
her to the river's bank. Purified as by fire, such 
a soul ascended in a chariot of flame. Great 
deeds not only appear in contrast with what is 
basest, but are inspired by it. In the darkest 
ages of corruption there have been reformers, 
prophets, heroes. We read of tyrants and 



110 MAN. 

oppressors, but they called out patriots, emanci- 
pators. We turn to times of persecution, and lo ! 
the noble army of martyrs. The shame and 
glory of humanity meet our eyes everywhere ; 
and though in the book of human life deeds are 
recorded over which the very heavens might 
weep, noble, heroic, divine things are also writ- 
ten there at .which heaven itself must rejoice. 

What theory can be deduced from such oppo- 
site manifestations ? One thing, at least, is proved. 
There are noble traits in humanity as well as 
base. There is good in man as well as evil. It 
has been too common to emphasize his frailty 
and baseness in theories of his nature, and over- 
look or disparage his grander qualities. Every 
such theory is indefensible, untrue to fact and life. 
Cowards, traitors, are not to be numbered, and 
heroes forgotten. What kindness, what sincerity, 
what honor, w r hat courage, are seen lighting up 
the face, giving beauty to life ! What quick 
sympathies there are, what melting compassions ! 
Bring the tortured sufferer before its eyes, and 
humanity is at his mercy, compelled by the 
necessity of its nature to give relief. What love 
exists, forgetting self in plans, toils, life-long sac- 
rifice ! Is it said these are merely instinctive, 
natural graces? Intermittent they certainly are, 



MAN. Ill 

needing to be cherished, enlarged, in order to 
become graces in the grandest sense, unfailing 
attributes and inspirations. But what must be 
the soil to which such flowers are native? The 
good belongs to humanity, certainly. Remember 
the men who hold fast their integrity and their 
honor in all possible revolutions of fortune, brave 
to meet financial ruin rather than swerve a hair's 
breadth from right. Remember the virtue in 
man and woman, that amid temptation repeats 
the victory of the wilderness. Remember the 
patience, fortitude, trust, ennobling lowly places. 
Remember the great names that illuminate his- 
tory, men of ancient days and heathen faiths, 
who feared God according to their light, and 
wrought righteousness ; the sages, moralists, found- 
ers of religions, whose precepts of duty shame 
Christendom. Remember the men of later time, 
the true saints, devotees not of forms but of 
righteousness, both within and without the pale of 
Christian communions ; souls all instinct with 
thoughts of charity, or fired by a quenchless love 
of liberty ; heroes battling, dying for human 
rights, philanthropists toiling, suffering to right 
human wrongs. Who were these but men unfold- 
ing qualities whose germs are sown broadcast 
in the soil of human nature? If you write on 



112 MAN. 

the roll of humanity the names of Nero, Caligula, 
Judas, write also the names of the Antonines, 
Howard, John. 

We advance another step. If the actual man- 
ifestations of human nature are so diverse, so 
contradictory, comprehending both divine and 
infernal qualities, which is its truer development ? 
For which was it made ? The answer comes 
from humanity itself. And, first, which does it 
accept as its representative? Which does it 
honor? The instinctive reverence of humanity 
turns towards its preordained king as the needle 
to the pole. Is it said that men have venerated 
base icleals, worshipped false gods ? The concep- 
tions of duty vary, and the virtues of one age 
may be the sins of a later day. Still in each it 
was virtue, or what was then deemed so, that 
commanded reverence. In all times, rude or 
enlightened, in the inspiring words of Paul, all 
nations of men were made of one blood to seek 
and feel after God, if haply they might find him. 
That instinct is as innate in human nature as the 
instinct of the child to feel after the mother's 
breast. Humanity gives one unvarying verdict. 
It pronounces the heartless man inhuman. It 
scorns the traitor, and venerates the patriot. It 
execrates the villain, and canonizes the saint. 



MAN. 113 

The very word inhumanity is the testimony of 
mankind recorded in language itself; a testi- 
mony more enduring than the statues of stone 
that symbolize its reverence for the great and 
good. The answer is always corning in the soul 
itself, and in human history. Which do we accept 
as the true types of human nature, — criminals 
whom society imprisons, the hollow-hearted, 
grasping, often more corrupt than the criminal 
himself, or the frank, generous, self-forgetting, 
whose lives touch us to admiration or tears, and 
take the soul captive for ever? Which does his- 
tory honor, — the politician trimming his sails 
to catch the shifting breezes of popular feeling, 
the demagogue catering to discontent, ignorance, 
vice, sitting in the temple of legislation to shape 
law itself for his own ends instead of the public 
weal, or the man who has " an oath registered in 
heaven" of loyalty to right, liberty, country? 
These self-seekers know themselves to be base. 
Could they be confronted by men clothed with 
patriotism and righteousness, as the money- 
changers in the temple were confronted by Jesus, 
it would need no -scourge to drive them from the 
seats which they profane : self-judged, lashed by 
the whips of conscience, they would go to their 
own place. Still, though they do not sentence 
8 



114 MAN. 

themselves, fearful and inevitable are the judg- 
ments of history. The verdict of the moment is 
often mistaken ; but the verdict of ages is just, 
awarding to the servants of right and man their 
meed of honor, dooming the self-seekers to eternal 
scorn. 

But the answer of humanity itself to the ques- 
tion, which is its true development, is given in 
its own essential qualities. There are great 
moral characteristics inherent in its nature, insep- 
arable from it, that give the same reply. Whence 
comes this sublime idea of justice, never silenced, 
for ever demanding more perfect recognition in 
society, law, government, overthrowing tyranny, 
uprooting slavery ; sometimes prompting ignorant 
men, maddened by real or fancied wrongs, to act 
in a blind fury, but always, in its veriest mad- 
ness, dreaming that it is laboring for juster insti- 
tutions, a nobler victory of the right ? Whence 
comes the grand thought of serving truth and 
justice for their own sake, without regard to 
reward, because they are in themselves sacred ? 
Here is a thought shaming many a representation 
of religion itself, pictured in the old legend of 
the monk who wished to destroy heaven and put 
out the fires of hell, in order that men might 
learn to live righteously, neither bribed by hope 



MAN. 115 

nor impelled by fear. And whence, too, are these 
conceptions of God himself, of his infinity, truth, 
justice, love? Is it said that they come to us 
from without? Quickened they are by outward 
revelations, unfolded into strength and beauty, 
as the seed into plant and flower by the agency 
of nature. But no such ideas could be gained 
unless their germs were planted within us. The 
pure in heart see God. What power must be 
inborn to enable it to attain such a vision of the 
infinite? Man has a universe of influences like 
angels to attend him, and call the universe of 
truth in himself into life. Once more, what 
is the conscience itself, which, though blinded, 
mistaken, brings the divine idea of duty, and is 
a power in ourselves that makes for righteous- 
ness ; which, though seared, transiently silenced, 
never dies ; which blanches the cheek with fear, 
and causes the knees to smite together, and writes 
letters of doom on palace walls ; which sees 
stains upon the murderous hand that would 
turn the ocean red, and Avrings out the cry, 
"Which way I fly is hell: myself am hell"? 
Here are not merely proofs of grand moral ele- 
ments in human nature, but their actual mani- 
festations, not to be set aside in our theories, but 
recognized as attributes of man's truer self, — the 



116 MAN. 

self tliat makes him a man, for ever answering 
the question respecting his normal development. 
And the same answer comes even in man's 
degradation. Does any one say such views over- 
look his actual sinfulness? If his noble traits 
prove inherent nobility, do not base ones equally 
prove inherent baseness? We shut our eyes to 
no degradation, no beastliness of appetite and 
passion ; to no tendencies to secret sins of pride, 
envy, hatred ; to no possibilities of crime. Rather 
do we set them in order before us in their atrocity 
and look down into the hells, to learn what hu- 
manity answers for itself even there. If, as one 
theory asserts, man has been gradually developed 
from a lower type of being, the long centuries 
have not yet removed all traces of his ancestry. 
The mark of the beast is not erased. The cata- 
logue of sins is of interminable length, and deeds 
of unmitigated horror are recorded there. New 
ingenuities of crime are reported with every 
morning's sun. We hear of outrages that seem 
to transcend the possibilities of human depravity, 
the work of fiends. It is not only terrible deeds 
that appall us. Tendencies to evil seem inwrought 
in many a life, ready to reveal themselves amid 
temptation, as lurking tendencies to disease de- 
velop into deadly activity in the noxious air. 



MAN. 117 

There are transmitted qualities of evil also, in- 
herited appetites, that a spark may kindle into 
consuming fire. Thank God, the good men do is 
not interred with their bones, though under the 
great law of heredity the evil also lives to curse 
those who come after them. Born in iniquity, 
with the stamp of wicked or brutal parentage on 
their organization itself, cradled in shame and 
crime, there are those whose depravity seems 
foreordained, inevitable, hopeless. Yes, and even 
in lives cursed by no such hereditary tendencies, 
stained by no flagrant vices, the workings of 
sinful feeling often show the trail of the serpent. 
A distinguished preacher speaks of the natural- 
ness of the question of the disciples, " Lord, is it 
I ? " when Jesus said, " One of you shall betray 
me." The suggestion of such a crime led each 
to conceive and tremble at possibilities of un- 
known evil in himself. No man rightly estimates 
himself if, when he unrolls the life even of grosser 
sinners, he does not feel that in their circum- 
stances he might have been like them. How 
many are sheltered from temptations that might 
have ruined them ! " Is it I ? " Is it a true brother, 
his nature like mine, only differing in the circum- 
stances, temptations of his life, w T ho did, or is do- 
ing, these revoking, damning deeds? In him do 



118 MAN. 

I see myself in a lot like his? Take into view 
all the facts and possibilities of human sinfulness, 
but still repeat the great thought of Paul, It is 
not I, the real self, but the sin that has for a time 
overmastered me. It is not the real self, but the 
demon that possesses it. Believe with Paul in an 
inward man that delights in truth and righteous- 
ness. The wrong-doer repudiates his own life 
as false to himself, as to God. What is remorse 
but the solemn judgment of the true upon the 
false self ? What more touching revelation of 
man's nature than the longings, prayers, tears 
of the transgressor himself, willing to bear any 
punishment if the child can be saved from his 
own fall? Tortured by the thought of betray- 
ing innocent blood, self-judged, self-condemned, 
Judas hangs himself. Coming to himself, the 
prodigal goes back to his father. Tormented by 
the memory of his base life, the rich man in hell 
remembers his brothers in his father's house, and 
pleads that a messenger be sent to warn them. 
Out of the deeps of depravity and hell, human 
nature gives the same answer. Not the debased, 
but the noble, the heroic men, are its true repre- 
sentatives. Even great men and great ages are 
not miracles in history, but occasional outshinings 
of powers always existing in human souls. In 



MAN. 119 

grand lives and heroic men, Providence gives an 
illustration of what it is to be a man. Perhaps 
we may say, even in respect to intellectual great- 
ness, that the difference between ages of darkness 
and of light is not so much in gifts of genius as 
in the slumber or activity of human thought. In 
periods of brilliant mental achievement, in men 
whose names are classic, seeds of genius ripened 
such as often lie dormant and never unfold into 
beauty. 

"Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid 

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; 
Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed, 
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre." 

But if the position is questioned in this par- 
ticular, it is beyond denial in respect to spiritual 
greatness. Who were the brave and true in peril 
and persecution? Were they not men ? What 
heroism burned in workshop and farm, in hearts 
and homes, in man and woman, when called to 
defend a flag more priceless than life, — a flag 
worthy to bear the stars? Who were they that 
seem to stand near the cross itself? Not the 
select minds of history. Unlearned fishermen be- 
came apostles, martyrs. Gentle maidens, shrink- 
ing from the gaze of men, braved the lions and 



120 MAN. 

yet more savage men. Many a mother stood by 
the cross of her son, as " Mary stood the cross 
beside." Were these spirits sent down from 
heaven, or are they typical of our common nature, 
of what you and I might be ? Faith in a sublime 
truth, loyalty to a great purpose, will make the 
faces of men shine like the sun, and their raiment 
white as the light. These true souls are the 
normal examples of our humanity ; and Ave are 
but shapes and forms, and not men, if we do not 
aspire for a life like theirs. 

Accept the affirmations which human nature 
warrants in its instinctive reverence for right 
and virtue, in its inherent characteristics, in the 
verdict which it for ever gives against its own 
degradation. Are they confirmed by Scripture ? 
Not only are they confirmed, but emphasized, 
enforced. First, the Bible speaks of human 
character rather than of human nature. It draws 
vivid pictures of human wickedness. Studying 
its histories, reading the rebukes of prophets, we 
picture to ourselves periods of degeneracy, when, 
in the intense language characteristic of Scrip- 
ture, men had all gone out of the way, "none do- 
ing good, — no, not one." Yet all the while there 
were men who hurled out these indignant rebukes, 
witnesses for truth and right ; and every such in- 



MAN. 121 

dictment against man was drawn by man himself. 
If Paul, speaking of the actual condition of the 
Gentile world, out of which converts had been 
brought, says, "We were by nature children of 
wrath, even as others," he also says, "Gentiles 
who have not the law do by nature the things 
contained in the law, and show the work of the 
law written in their hearts." What a grand as- 
sertion of the truth that there is a law written 
upon the soul itself which ordains righteousness ! 
Peter, consciously or unconsciously, recognized 
that truth in the brave words, brave even now, 
" In every nation he that f eareth God, and worketh 
righteousness, is accepted with him." Jesus as- 
serted it when he said, " They shall come from 
the east and the west, the north and the south, 
and sit down in the kingdom of God." The Bible 
is not the narrow book that men have made it. 
It recognizes but one thing, — righteousness ; and 
whether men do by nature what righteousness 
demands, whenever and however they attain to 
it, they belong to the one fold of the one shep- 
herd. And now we turn directly to the teaching 
of the true leader, Jesus. It has been justly said 
that the gospel is far removed from a low view 
of human nature. It is significant that not one 
of the passages chiefly cited to prove its depravity 



122 MAN. 

came from the lips of Jesus. On the contrary, 
every thing in his teaching and life implies or 
asserts its worth and greatness. First, what an 
estimate of it is involved in his own mission and 
work. He toils, pleads, dies, for a nature worthy 
of all that labor and sacrifice. No price is too 
costly, no cross too heavy, if humanity can be 
brought back to itself. A divine idea of its 
worth and sacredness is the only solution of such 
a ministry. And, next, what a sublime view of 
it his teachings imply and confirm ! Hear his 
words : " It is not the will of your Father in 
heaven that one of these little ones should per- 
ish;" and, again, "Joy shall be in heaven over 
one sinner that repenteth more than over ninety 
and nine that need no repentance." What a 
picture it suggests to the imagination of the 
countless throng of the loving and pure watching 
the life of one straying soul in infinite longings ; 
even the heavens grieved at its wandering, re- 
joicing at its return ! But the proof of Christ's 
estimate of human nature is revealed even more 
clearly, if possible, in the w\ay in which he ap- 
pealed to it. The royal distinction of his teach- 
ing is that it manifested a trust in humanity 
which, even now, we scarcely begin to compre- 
hend. To whom did he speak in the sublime 



MAN. 123 

words of the Sermon on the Mount, in precepts 
and parables, in synagogues and. villages, by the 
lake and in desert places? To Pharisees, Scribes, 
the learned of Palestine, indeed ; but also to 
lowly fishermen, the despised, the outcasts. " And 
the common people heard him gladly." Humble, 
simple natures drank in his words as the earth 
drinks in the dew. Jesus gives no theories of 
God or man. He embodies his conception of God 
in the word father. He reveals his idea of man 
by the method of his teaching. When he who 
" knew what was in man " presents the sublimest 
truths to the humblest minds, his view of hu- 
manity becomes as clear as the noon-day. What 
statement so conclusive as such a trust? Better 
than the most emphatic declaration that we are 
the children of God is it to be welcomed as sons, 
to have the treasures of truth opened to us as 
our inheritance, and be recognized as heirs. Re- 
membering the way in which Jesus spoke to men, 
often drawing the highest truth out of their own 
minds, presenting it always as a teaching which, 
though before unknown, their nature was made 
to receive, we are led to the thought that even 
his sublime words are but the full revelation of 
the light lighting every man that cometh into 
the world, what each must see for himself as he 
gains the same spiritual life. 



124 MAN. 

And if the words of Jesus are the words which 
the soul was made to receive, — its own words, in 
its true estate, — we can understand the name ap- 
plied to him, " Son of man." Son of man ! Hu- 
manity has had grand illustrations of its truer 
self in heroes, prophets, martyrs, saints ; but 
Jesus incarnates its ideal purity and beauty. 
When you ask what humanity is, do not look at 
it when dwarfed by ignorance or debased by sin. 
I borrow Robertson's illustration. If you wish 
really to know a tree, you do not take its stunted 
specimens in a barren soil or in arctic cold : you 
look at it in a genial climate, putting forth its 
majesty as the monarch of the forest. So, when 
studying humanity, in order to learn its nature, 
you look upon him who w r as the Son of man. 

And yet one more step remains to complete 
the Christian view of human nature. To be a 
Son of man is to be a Son of God. There is 
no merely speculative, but the most profoundly 
spiritual, significance in these two appellations 
applied to the same person. Here is a view 
which I know not how to express. But all cul- 
minates in this : that to be really a man is to be a 
son of God, — not his creature, but his child ; that 
our higher nature is like his nature, that our love 
is a spark from his love, our sense of right and 



MAN. 125 

justice an inspiration from him ; in one word, be- 
wildering as it is, that we are "partakers of the 
divine nature," made to receive the life of God, 
and, in every point in which the finite can re- 
semble the infinite, reflect his glory. It is this 
mortal that must put on life and immortality. 
"Now are we the sons of God, and it doth not 
yet appear what we shall be, but we shall be like 
him; for Ave shall see him as he is." 

Do you ask what are our affirmations respect- 
ing man ? We affirm what human nature affirms 
in its nobler or baser workings, what Christianity 
affirms in the words Son of man and Son of God. 
Never disparage a nature once incarnated in Him 
( who is the model and the despair of the centu- 
ries. Reverence it in the weakest, and minister 
to it as to the Lord himself. Never overlook its 
actual and possible degradation, brutality, selfish- 
ness, and passion, when it so often needs regener- 
ation to reawaken it to life. Yet still believe in 
it even in the basest, in the true self, imperisha- 
ble in the prodigal's abandonment, sure to revive 
as he is perishing with hunger in some period of 
his history, and realize the picture in the great 
parable of Jesus. Honor it in yourself till you 
see how unpardonable it is to throw away the 
great possibilities of manhood and fall into mean- 



126 MAN. 

ness, deceit, self-seeking, the damning loathsome- 
ness of appetite and lust, — unpardonable as the 
sin against the Holy Ghost. Yes, remember and 
fear the possibilities of evil, and compass yourself 
about with all helps, human and divine, till you 
can look up and say, Father, in the sweet assur- 
ance that you are his child. 



VI. 

THE CHURCH: THE SOCIETY WHICH 
JESUS GATHERED. 

BY REV. RUFUS ELLIS, D.D. 

u Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there 
am T in the midst of them." — Matt, xviii. 20. 

THE subject of my sermon is the society 
which the Master of Christians gathered. 
Jesus did not write. He trusted in the su- 
preme Spirit, and in that spoken word which his 
own life illustrated and enforced. He committed 
his work to a living, life-giving, and immortal 
congregation of faithful men and women, who 
by him did believe in God which raised him 
from the dead and gave him glory. Their minds 
and hearts were the good ground in which the 
Son of man sowed the good seed that should 
spring up and bear fruit world without end. 
This, under God, was the Lord's dependence, — 
the hiding-place of his power ; at once the ever- 
proceeding Spirit and the ever-renewed and 
ever-growing body of the everlasting religion. 



128 THE CHURCH: 

Evermore invisibly, as for a little while visibly, 
he should be the head of this society, quickening, 
guiding, comforting. So he finished, and again 
began the work which was given to him to do, 
and provided for those spiritual and moral tri- 
umphs which came and are to come. This was 
the little flock to which it was the Father's good 
pleasure to give the kingdom without end, the 
Church of the living God, the Pillar and Ground 
of the Truth from the time when, as we read 
in the Book of Acts, the names of the disciples 
were about one hundred and twentv, to the 
present hour and its hundreds of millions. It 
might well have seemed to human eyes a slender 
dependence. In that little company, not many 
were mighty, not many were wise. Not one of 
them could bear to hear what their Master had 
to tell them. Fulfilment, not destruction, was 
his method ; and they might be slow to discern 
between what was to pass away and what was 
to remain and to be the germ of the new cre- 
ation. But he had come to those who had re- 
ceived him, and he gave them power to become 
children of God ; and his spirit in their minds 
and hearts was the inexhaustible source of moral 
and mental growth. We know their works, and 
our incalculable debt to them: how they gath- 



THE SOCIETY WHICH JESUS GATHERED. 129 

ered and sifted and put into such order as was 
still possible the priceless Christian traditions 
and writings, the little tracts that were to re- 
place the books of philosophy, and to be a new 
Bible for the world ; how the life in them took 
body and form for coming ages, and beautiful 
Christian usages became sacraments, and orders 
for a day, which, as they thought, was far-spent, 
abiding ordinances ; how, whilst they waited and 
longed for their world to come to an end, they 
so wrought and suffered and grew in all graces, 
that their world, which seemed just ready to 
perish, could not come to an end, but entered 
upon a new age, — and so swiftly and earnestly 
that, when the earliest Christian writings (the 
Epistles of Paul ) begin to appear, the Church 
lias already made great strides towards the pos- 
session of its promised inheritance, and a vast 
multitude gathered into the purest and sweetest 
light which can shine for the children of men 
have another king, — one Jesus. In the prov- 
idence of God, this has proved to be the As- 
sembly of assemblies, the Church of churches. 
He who setteth the solitary in families, and 
gathers the church in the house, which is the 
Home, and the church in the wilderness, which is 
the State, binds his children together at last, one 
9 



130 THE CnURCH: 

body in Christ, which is the church of the living 
God. In its rudiments, this society has existed 
from the earliest times and amongst the rudest 
people. From the very dawn of civilization, men 
and women have gathered before God, and, as in 
the presence of the Unseen, drawn in some way 
past our finding out to the mysterious Power 
whose nature and name are so hidden from them, 
but whose works everywhere meet their eyes and 
stir their thoughts, and of whose voice in their 
hearts they begin to catch faint, far-off whispers. 
All this is now fulfilled. "The field," said Jesus, 
"is the world." He gathers and inspires not a 
school of philosophy, nor a little knot of admir- 
ing, loyal followers, to quote and comment upon 
his words ever after. He and his shall be the 
salt of the earth ; he and. his, the light of the 
world in all its ages, — a light shining brighter 
and brighter unto the perfect day. It is the 
necessity of his eternal Sonship, the law of his 
spiritual and moral life. He passed from the 
Cross to the Throne of Glory, to be judge of 
the nations as inevitably as the sun climbs into 
the noontide sky. He is a king, and can be no 
other. He stands between us and God, not to 
separate us from him, but to bring us to him, 
with his open-eyed consciousness of the Father, 



THE SOCIETY WHICH JESUS GATHERED. 131 

his perfect sonship. his absolute trust in holy 
love, his singleness of heart and life, his love 
unto death for the Father's children, and his life 
and light, are the life and light of men, — our 
life and light, here and now. 

And, as I say, I wish to speak to you of the 
society which Jesus gathers ; of the spirit which 
is to be its inmost and essential life ; of the 
simplicity of its form and methods ; and of the 
pressing human needs which this life and this 
simplicity are abundantly able to meet. 

1. And, first, of its inmost and essential life. 
What this must be, we gather from the Master's 
own lips. We read that once there went great 
multitudes with him, and he turned and said unto 
them, " If any man come to me, and hate not his 
father and mother and wife and children and 
brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, 
he cannot be my disciple." So he distinguishes 
those who go with him from the true discipleship, 
for which alone, in a movement of world-wide 
proportions, he holds himself accountable. The 
disciple, like his Master, must have no life that 
he calls his own. He may not separate himself 
from God, as if the Father's business did not 
always take precedence of every other work. 
One supreme affection, one absolute trust, one 



132 THE CHURCH: 

absorbing, consuming desire, must give the law 
to the true follower. Less than this might suf- 
fice for other undertakings, but would be found 
absurdly and even ignominiously inadequate for 
an enterprise which proposed no less than the 
conquest of a world ; as if one should leave an 
unfinished tower as a monument of his thriftless- 
ness and folly, or go out with ten thousand to 
be defeated by one coming against him with 
twenty thousand. For the great body which we 
commonly call the Church, better or worse, Jesus 
is not responsible. It is ours, not his. He did 
not found it : he does not and never did depend 
upon it. To an enormous, amazing, and de- 
plorable extent, it is entirely aside from and 
contrary to his aims and methods ; and, though 
it contains the discipleship, is not the discipleship. 
It is only another, and often a worse, world, — 
one of the institutions to be reformed, and not 
seldom one of the worst accomplices in the 
wrong-doing of men and nations. Regarded, as 
an establishment, it may be a serious question 
whether it has not done more harm than good. 
Understand me : I am not arraigning the Church ; 
I am not blind to her providential mission ; I can 
easily admit that Christendom is at least good 
missionary ground, by reason of the light which 



THE SOCIETY WHICH JESUS GATHERED. 133 

rays out from many a faithful Christian congre- 
gation into the darkness around : but the multi- 
tude which go with Jesus must not be confounded 
with the discipleship. Take the better sort, even 
of this multitude, — the serious, the devout, the 
conscientious, the kindly, the generous, — the peo- 
ple who, on the whole, are favorably distinguished 
from those in the nations who profess the non- 
Christian religions, and it is very easy and very 
necessary to distinguish them from disciples, as 
Jesus defined and depicted them. Doubtless, the 
Lord, beholding them, loves them ; but as he 
loved the young man who had not the heart to 
follow him, and was sorry for his short-corning, 
but not sorry enough to enter upon a nobler life. 
Where would Christianity have been, if its first 
company of disciples had been only average 
Christians ? They had no silver and gold, that 
they should make collections and subscribe to 
missions, and send others to preach in their stead. 
Such a religion would never have got even to 
Antioch to be baptized as Christianity. Excellent 
and useful person as your every-day Christian is, 
engaged in his daily and engrossing work, occu- 
pied with his unceasing round of summer and 
winter amusements, fulfilling, as he says, his 
duties to society, — yes, even at his devotions, 



134 THE CHURCH: 

with his cushion to sit upon, his hassock to kneel 
upon, his prayer-book with the gilded cross on 
the outside of it to read from, his fastidiousness 
as to the weather, the distance, the companionship, 
and all the other conditions of church-goin^, 
there would be something incongruous to the 
verge of absurdity in applying to him the lan- 
guage in which this homeless man at once invites 
and repels discipleship. Let the Church plead 
her own cause. She is in possession, and should 
not find it difficult to keep possession ; but this 
can be in the end only as she becomes more and 
more a discipleship. The true followers can only 
bless mankind. If any venture to talk about the 
fanaticism, the neglect of household and social 
duties and charities, the overshadowing of this 
world, which also is one of God's worlds, which 
must proceed from such exceeding, and, as they 
will say, extreme devotion to Christ, — I answer, 
unhesitatingly, that all this has come, not from a 
pure Christianity, but from the want of it ; not 
from loving God supremely, but from living a 
life centred upon self; not of forsaking all and 
following Jesus, but of man's un trustful and 
persistent keeping back, — and not least in the 
church, what belongs to God, his trying to save 
his own little life of passion, prejudice, opinion, 



THE SOCIETY WHICH JESUS GATHERED. 135 

station, culture, wealth, instead of taking his 
share in God's life of truth and charity. Fanat- 
icism in the name of religion, what we call the 
abuse of Christianity, is the characteristic, not 
of the discipleship, but of those who go with 
Jesus ; not of disciples, but of ecclesiastics. 

2. And now let me say, further, that, as the 
discipleship is to be distinguished from the vast 
multitude who profess and call themselves, or 
are called, Christians, so the simple and only 
essential forms and methods of discipleship may 
be most profitably distinguished from our great 
ecclesiasticisms. From the beginning of the 
Christian world, Jesus gathers his church not only 
into one great congregation of every name and 
nation, but into many and unnumbered congre- 
gations ; and each one of these, be it larger or 
smaller, is a true Church of Christ, if it be in- 
deed of his gathering and inspiring, " met in 
his name," it may be " two or three," it may 
be two or three hundreds, it may be two or three 
thousands. It is enough that they are mastered 
by him, possessed by his thought, docile to his 
methods, resolved to obey him and to win the world 
to his obedience. If any asks, " Who gathered 
this church?" it is enough to say, "He who in 
all these lands and these ages, which are called 



136 THE CHURCH: 

Christian, has been gathering churches, — the one 
who is our Master." " The visible Church of 
Christ," says the nineteenth of the Thirty-nine 
Articles, " is a congregation of faithful men, in 
the which the pure Avord of God is preached, and 
the Sacraments be duly ministered according to 
Christ's ordinance, in all those things that of 
necessity are requisite to the same." According 
to this definition, the local congregation is as 
truly the Church of Christ as the vast company 
of Christians the world over. Of course, con- 
gregations may well confer together and act 
together, and be a body of Christ, just as indi- 
vidual Christians. And yet in the last resort, 
whatever authority in controversies of faith, or 
power to decree rites and ceremonies, belongs to 
universal Christendom, inheres in the local con- 
gregation, because the local congregation is as 
truly and essentially the Church of Christ as the 
whole of Christendom. Christianity is not a 
philosophy or a scholasticism. It is the light 
of life, — plain truth for plain people; and it 
commends itself to every hungry heart, and to 
every man's conscience in the sight of God. 

And we want to understand that, according to 
the simple rule of Jesus, this church may be yours 
and mine. We want to understand what a church 



THE SOCIETY WHICH JESUS GATHERED. 137 

as simply constituted as this may and ought to 
propose and do, without waiting for the indorse- 
ment of any hierarchy. However imperfectly 
organized and certified such a church may seem 
to the ecclesiastic, the Spirit of the Lord Avill so 
empower and command the least of his little 
flocks, that the world shall recognize in them 
churches of Christian disciples ; and nothing is so 
much needed in Christendom to-day as precisely 
these Christian congregations, simple in their 
forms, but of a divine life. 

3. And yet the Christian congregation as a 
society, inspired, authorized, and organized for 
Christian work, one body and one mind and one 
spirit, each member of royal and priestly estate, 
heir of the promise which was made, not only to 
the individual disciple, but to Christians in coun- 
cil, living a corporate life, — in a word, the con- 
gregation which Jesus gathers, — is not the power 
it ought to be to-day in Christendom. This church 
is not fulfilled in an assembly for listening to 
preaching, or for the observance of Christian 
ordinances, in a mere audience or company of 
worshippers scattered, it may be, each to his 
own, with or without greetings, when service 
and sermon are ended ; nor yet in the annual 
meeting of pew-hirers or pew-proprietors ; still 



138 THE CHURCH: 

less in the occasional coming together of some 
vestry, standing committee, or board of trustees. 
Even the conference meeting, which still lingers, 
is not the congregation ; for it is almost exclu- 
sively pietistic, — if one may use the word in no 
invidious sense, — and brings together for the most 
part only the more devout. At best, sometimes, 
there is a vague feeling that what passes for 
a church is not after all a church, because, whilst 
common prayer is maintained, and the Christian 
traditions are kept alive, and the household are 
more or less visited by the pastor, there is no 
active Christian organism. Acting upon this vague 
feeling, fellow listeners, fellow worshippers, fellow 
pew-hirers or pew-owners, being strangers to each 
other, say suddenly, " Let us be strangers no longer : 
let us come together ; let us be sociable ; " and 
they resolve themselves into a tea party, a talking 
party, a debating society, sometimes even a danc- 
ing party. But, though eating and drinking are 
sacramental, and to be done unto His glory who 
came eating and drinking, and exemplifies the 
religion of every-day life, the case is hardly 
met. We have houses and assembly rooms for 
these illustrations of the Master's spirit, and for 
revealing the divine capabilities of earth and 
time. Christianity cannot by such means com- 



THE SOCIETY WHICH JESUS GATHERED. 139 

plete itself in a Christian civilization. Though 
there were no stated preacher or celebrant, the 
congregation should still gather, drawn together 
in the spirit of Jesus, — men and women, old and 
young, taught and untaught, not theologians or 
ecclesiastics, or delegates to a church convention 
or congress, but the Christian people, in simple, 
hearty loyalty to Jesus, with the open Bible in 
their hands, and hearts set upon righteousness. 
As towns-people gather together as towns-people, 
and organize and confer and act in what we call 
a town meeting, so Christian people should come 
together in the name of Jesus, and organize as 
Christian people to carry forward the work of 
the kingdom of God. There are principles and 
affections, motives of hope and fear, ladings and 
precedents, enthusiasms, aspirations, disciplines, 
w T hich are proper to man as a child of God ; and 
through these He who knows what is in man, 
and what man needs, binds us into households 
of faith, hope, and love. In such households, we 
are engaged to pursue a higher life on earth as 
under opened heavens; and, so gathered and in- 
spired, we can be no longer pessimists, but only 
optimists, as they the root of whose being is a 
divine sonship must needs be. A congregation 
so gathered and bound in the Spirit can hardly 



140 THE CHURCH: 

be what the Church so often has been, — "a den 
of thieves." • The State and the Church may 
seem almost identical, and in simple commu- 
nities may almost be so; the good townsman 
scarcely to be distinguished from the g< od 
churchman. But, for the most part, Church and 
State must be two : the one more economical 
than spiritual and moral, the other more spiritual 
and moral than economical ; and the Church ever 
proclaiming for the world its higher and more 
absolute law. I anticipate what w T ill be said 
about fanaticisms, idiosyncrasies, narrowness, one- 
sidedness, the ignorance or the insolence of big- 
otry, the license which makes free with the truth 
and calls itself liberality; but I fail to see how 
Jesus encounters any more serious difficulties, as 
he seeks to gather us now into the light of life 
and into the path of a practical Christianity, than 
he met and surmounted in the church at Jeru- 
salem, struggling out of the shadows and forms 
of the old covenant, or in the church at Corinth, 
with psalm-singing, prophesying, and speaking 
with tongues enough to drive a sober, modern 
church-goer frantic. The churches of Jerusalem, 
Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome, as that nine- 
teenth article tells us, "have erred, not only 
in their living and manner of ceremonies, but 



THE SOCIETY WHICH JESUS GATHERED. 141 

also in matters of faith;" and this, though they 

have had much benefit of clergy, and have lis- 
tened to the tongue of the learned, — for churches, 
though inspired, are not infallible : they must 
still be learning more of the truth, and, like the 
Church of Scotland in our day, rewriting their 
confessions, and so growing, as the Lord himself 
grew in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with 
God and man. And, indeed, the principles and 
aims of Christianity are so practical, that the 
wayfaring and unlearned, if only the filial spirit 
be in him, shall not eer therein. If what we 
want is light to walk in and to work by, we shall 
find it, and come together in it, that we may see 
it lighting up the faces of fellow Christians; and 
that each man's thought may be confirmed a 
hundred-fold, when he finds that it is shared by 
another, and all be patient and hopeful and brave 
together. 

Because of the work which it can do in our 
world, I long for a revival of the congregation 
of Christ's flock. I pray that it may accept 
anew from the Master's own hands his gospel 
of light and love ; that it may be the salt of the 
earth and a city set on a hill. Christianity must 
continually begin afresh in the congregation of 
faithful men and women. No matter how much 



142 THE CHURCH: 

we may multiply congresses, conventions, con- 
vocations, conferences, synods, unless the gospel 
lives in the congregation, and lives abundantly, 
its faiths every day made perfect in works, our 
Christianity is dying. In the congregation as in 
the germ cell, the mystery of the new creation 
is enfolded, the promise and the potency of the 
new heavens and the new earth. And it is es- 
pecially and profoundly interesting to see what 
wealth of practical Christian truth is committed 
to the congregation of the faithful to be trans- 
muted into life ; how every jot and tittle of it 
waits to be applied to our modern societies, to 
be wrought into their civilization, a savor of life, 
a principle of divine order, growth, and beauty, 
destined not merely to relieve superficially and 
for the moment, but even to anticipate and pre- 
vent and stamp out the most threatening ills of 
the commonwealth and nation. 

There are plain Christian principles which 
bear directly upon human society as we see it 
to-day, and of which this human society stands 
in direct need ; and it would seem as if the very 
stones would cry out Against us, if we did not 
come together to set them forth and apply them. 
These principles are the beginning and the end, 
the undoubted sum and substance of practical 



THE SOCIETY WHICH JESUS GATHERED. 143 

Christianity, in its relations to a world which 
it comes to redeem and refashion and beautify. 
The congregation, like the gatherings of the 
people for political reform and reconstruction, has 
its platform, its truths to be transmuted into life, 
its mind and heart of the meeting, its points to 
carry, its specific measures to propose, its com- 
mittees of conference and action. It has some- 
thing in hand besides the choice and maintenance 
of a minister, the care of a building, the assess- 
ment and collection of taxes, the management 
of a church sociable. It is a branch of the 
society which Jesus gathered ; it is met before God 
as he is revealed in Jesus ; it holds in its bosom 
the germ of a life which even yet is not fully 
expanded ; it ought to have counsel and comfort 
for man in all great straits ; it ought to be a 
power in our age, as in the ages which have 
gone before it. It would seem that the con- 
gregation could hardly lack for topics and inter- 
ests, if only wise and simple would meet together 
in the name of Jesus, and set about applying 
his teachings. His words are as tracts for the 
times, and need only to be translated out of 
the language of his day into the language of our 
day ; and scarcely that, so universal w T as the 
Lord's speech. Naturally and inevitably, the 



144 THE CHURCH: 

Spirit takes of the things of Christ, and shows 
them unto us, not necessarily in synods and con- 
gresses, but in the gathering of the two and 
three, it may be with differences of manifesta- 
tion and varieties of application, but always to 
the same end. Glance for a moment at these 
great vital truths, — the treasure of the congre- 
gation of the faithful, the laws of a Christian 
commonwealth, the conditions of success in the 
Christian race. 

1. It is our religion, at once its letter and its 
spirit^ that the nature of man can be unfolded, 
and his earthly life completed and rounded, and 
all his needs, whether of wisdom, health, beauty, 
length of days, — all that is truly good, — supplied 
only in the spirit and power of righteousness, — 
the righteousness of which God is the source, 
and our moral being the abiding witness. This 
is the first. plank in the platform: made of sea- 
soned timber, it never gives. Only as we are 
faithful to our moral instincts, is there any prog- 
ress of society. The kingdom of God must come 
first. Without righteousness, nothing ; with right- 
eousness, every thing. 

2. Again, it is our religion, at once its letter 
and its spirit, that every thing merely personal 
and selfish goes into the outer darkness; that 



THE SOCIETY WHICH JESUS GATHERED. 145 

a life centred upon self starves and dies ; that 
the way to get every thing is to give every 
thing; that what you keep you lose; that what 
you give you have; that the self which rules out 
whatsoever is honest, lovely, and of good report, 
pronounces its own sentence, digs its own grave, 
and, when it is buried out of sight, the world loses 
nothing which is worth mentioning. 

3. Again, it is our religion, at once its letter 
and its spirit, that the true human society on 
earth, under whatsoever form of government, 
whether Herod reigns or Tiberius, whether the 
ruler is born or chosen, is that in which each 
lives for all, and all for each ; and the head cannot 
say to the hand, "I do all the devising, and have 
no need of thee ;" and the hand cannot say to the 
head, "I do all the labor, and have no need of 
thee." We are one body in Christ. If we will 
not rise together as a family and grow together 
as a vine, if all will be masters and none servants, 
if we demand not only equality of opportunity, 
but equality of harvest, then it is vain to talk 
of prosperity. According to our religion, men 
must learn to dig and plant and weave and buy 
and sell for others, just as for ages they have 
gone to battle and been killed for others. Jesus 
teaches that, where this is done in love, the life 
10 



146 THE CHURCH: 

of the individual, instead of being merged and 
so lost in the common life, is made more truly 
individual, real, personal, and precisely and char- 
acteristically what God, who has a purpose con- 
cerning each one of us, meant it to be ; and the 
result is not a communism, but a commonwealth. 
4. And it is our religion, at once its letter 
and its spirit, that, for motive power, for impulse 
and restraint, for building men up and holding 
them to the hard and unceasing labors of life, 
for securing needful changes in the order of 
society and inrooted habits of evil, our chief 
reliance must be upon the inward and spiritual, 
what comes from within and from above, the 
good which overcomes evil, the love which casts 
out fear, believing all things and creat'ng the 
world it would have, so that the things which 
are seen are not made of things which appear. 
Jesus will allow you to make the nation's laws, 
if you will allow him, in the spirit of his Father, 
to move upon the nation's heart. His spirit is 
the spirit of fulfilment, not of destruction. It 
changes darkness into day simply by being light, 
and shining into the darkness. It is what it 
believes in, and believes in it because it is what 
it believes. So Jesus stands at the door — nay, 
he is the door — of the kingdom of God on earth, 



THE SOCIETY WHICH JESUS GATHERED. 147 

the vision of prophets, the dream of philosophers, 
poets, and economists ; and teaches, Except ye 
be converted, born from above, renewed in the 
spirit of your mind a divine man, you cannot so 
much as truly see this kingdom, much less enter 
into it ; and, save as such divine men abound, no 
new heavens and new earths are possible. It 
was, at least, a true instinct, when the fathers of 
some of our commonwealths said to those who 
would join the State, " You must join the Church 
first." We cannot undertake to carry on human 
society, save in the fear and love of God. We 
will have a church, and the rest will follow. 

5. And, finally, it is our religion, at once its 
letter and its spirit, that the kingdom of God is 
at hand; that to him who believes all things are 
possible ; that the materials from which the king- 
dom is to be fashioned are within and around ; 
that the King is here, judging the nations, and 
conspicuously those that have come into the light 
of his life on earth. The business of Christians 
is first of all with this world ; and they are 
under an instant necessity to make it Christian, 
simply because Christianity is the law of its life, 
— a law as fatal in its working as the law of 
gravity. Just as when Jesus foretold the swiftly 
advancing doom of the city so dear to him, so his 



148 TEE CHURCH: 

spirit speaketh expressly here and now ; and 
whoso readeth, let him understand ; whoso hath 
ears to hear, let him hear, — not of some scarcely 
conceivable day of judgment in some other and 
remote world, but of desolations which threaten 
us and ours. Our worst ills come of our want 
of confidence in Christianity as the best reason 
of State, our persistent disregard of its precepts 
as unpractical, our virtual declaration that we 
have but one king, who is Caesar ; for whether it 
be the Jerusalem that fell under the hand of 
Titus, or these modern cities with their eager 
crowds, other foundation for earth and time can 
no man lay than Jesus laid in that answer to 
Pilate's question, "Art thou a king, then?" — 
" You have said it." The Lord of life and death, 
he has opened the heavens for us, that w^e may 
work in the light ; but this light shines to guide 
us in our earthly ways. " Behold ! I come 
quickly," is the word of the Lord to each suc- 
cessive age ; and his word is continually fulfilled, 
as many a j>roud State has learned to its sorrow, 
and after the things which concerned its peace 
had been hidden from their eyes. 

All this at which I have but hinted is only a 
part of our wealth as disciples of Jesus. Hap- 
pily, it is what we are all agreed about, and what 



THE SOCIETY WHICH JESUS GATHERED. 149 

concerns our living and working in this present 
mansion of the Father's house. It is enough to 
begin with, and as a preparation for that church 
of the future which can only come out of the 
church of to-day. 

And now the question is asked, " What spe- 
cially would you have us do?" When the 
prayers have been prayed, the psalms sung, the 
sermon preached, the supper ended, what re- 
mains ? Nothing, it may be, in that hour, except 
with kindly greetings to part in peace; but the 
congregation must come together again, and 
in some place in which they can see eye to eye, 
and speak brother to brother, and be in very 
deed a household. Two things they will propose 
to themselves : to have a distinctively Christian 
life, and to make this life helpful to others ; to 
be a living church, and, what perhaps is but 
another name for the same thing, — certainly 
another expression of the same life, — to be a 
missionary church. 

A church is nourishing its own life when it is 
adding knowledge and manliness to its faith, by 
frank and earnest conference bringing it into 
the light of the present day, and accepting the 
fresh interpretation of human experience and 
the world's history, and what we call the logic 



150 THE CHURCH: 

of events. Christianity is not only what Jesus 
can teach, but what we can hear; and we must 
meet together, not as theologians and ecclesiastics 
meet, but as the people meet, if we would catch 
the words which alone can save our souls and 
our State. And the congregation wants for its 
edification something more than the platitudes 
of the conference room, however sincerely ut- 
tered. We are called upon to love God with all 
our mind and w r ith all our strength, as well as 
with all our heart ; and, like the apostle Paul, 
we are to use great plainness of speech. And 
within the congregation there is a kind of min- 
istering of the strong to the weak, by which the 
weak are not made weaker, but stronger. The 
church should strive to present to the world 
around the image of a community rooted and 
grounded in a wise love, the good which alone 
overcomes evil. If the church has its poor, they 
ought not to be left to the world's charities ; 
and, if any are overtaken in a fault, they should 
be restored in a tender spirit, and yet with a firm 
hand. These are hard things, and some will say 
impossible ; but the congregation is met together 
in the name of Jesus, a society divine beyond 
any other, encouraged to undertake what for 
men is impossible, nothing unless it can do what 



THE SOCIETY WHICH JESUS GATHERED. 151 

other societies cannot do, — indeed, inferior to 
our fellowships and lodges and brotherhoods of 
one sort and another, if the faithful are gathered 
in a union which is only symbolic, and has no 
life which it lives in God by the grace of Jesus 
Christ. That we are fellow Christians of the 
same Christian household ought to be to us, even 
in the complications of our modern life, a reality 
of infinite moment. 

And the congregation of the faithful, which 
is the church of the living God, should have 
ever upon its mind and heart the pressing needs 
of those who are near enough to be helped, and 
not too far away to be pitied. By its very essence, 
it is missionary, engaged to make converts, under 
a necessity to preach the gospel ; to send forth 
everywhere its two and two, to meet the 
ever-pressing demand for personal ministrations 
amongst the poor, the ignorant, and the vicious ; 
to send brothers of mercy and sisters of charity 
to prisons ; to rescue neglected children from 
streets and gutters, and establish them in Chris- 
tian homes ; to fill and empty and refill its poor s- 
purse ; to undertake all out-of-door relief of the 
destitute ; to dry up the sources of pauperism and 
crime ; to show how sincerely it desires that the 
w r orld should be made better by making it better. 



152 THE CHURCH: 

Mr. Huxley tells us that any man can do this 
effectually who is possessed of only two beliefs: 
the first, that the order of nature is ascertainable 
by our faculties to an extent which is practically 
unlimited; the second, that our volition counts 
for something as a condition of the course of 
events. Each of these beliefs can be verified 
experimentally as often as we like to try. Now, 
if the Church can add to these beliefs the belief 
of beliefs, — that, if we draw nigh to God, he will 
draw nigh to us, and help us to make his world 
better ; and if, by awakening in us the knowledge 
that we are the children of Him who makes the 
world, it can move us to a deep and tender con- 
cern about its awful miseries, — our religion will 
be seen to be a power, and will scarcely need 
defenders. It has been well said that, " so long- 
as a Bossuet, a Fenelon, an Arnauld, were alive, 
the sceptic Bayle made few proselytes. The 
elevation of Cardinal Dubois and the like im- 
moral priests multiplied unbelievers and indif- 
ferents." When the salt has lost its savor, and 
is salt no longer, it must needs be trampled 
under the foot of men. And the Church must 
not limit its ministrations to the work of reliev- 
ing the poor, much less must it convert its chapels 
into soup-stations and storehouses of shoes and 



THE SOCIETY WHICH JESUS GATHERED. 153 

flannel. Its business is to consider the weak, and 
to justify its rooted conviction that no doctrines 
of the right of the strongest, and the survival of 
the fittest, and the struggle of life, can supplant 
and discredit the work and labor of love. Doubt- 
less, it is more blessed to give than to receive ; 
but what so blesses the giver does not, if it is 
wisely given, harm the receiver. It is the mission 
of the congregation to illustrate and establish 
by abundant experience this great Christian 
truth. 

The Church remains. It would remain, thongh 
much which passes under its name should per- 
ish, and new Catholicism and old Catholicism 
disappear together, and the spiritual authority 
of the Pope go the way of all the earth, as the 
temporal authority seems to have gone, and even 
priests, presbyters, and preachers vanish in like 
manner. The two or three shall meet together 
in the name of Jesus; and ubi duo aut tres, ibi 
Ecclesia, — where are the two or three, there is 
a church. But the things which remain always 
need to be strengthened, — if in the beginning, 
and whilst the heavens were all ablaze with the 
brightness of the just vanished form of the Lord, 
why not in these last days and in these ends of 
the earth ? Things are strong onlv as we are 



154 THE CHURCH. 

strong in them : not in the air, but in the lives 
of men, and specially in men who are met 
together and are one body, in which the Spirit 
may be for ever incarnate, and no disembodied 
ghost, — in the world, though not of the world, 
transmuting and transfiguring and recreating 
unto the measure of the stature of the fulness 
of Christ. i 



VII. 

THE LIFE ETERNAL.— HEAVEN AND HELL. 
BY REV. SAMUEL R. CALTHROP. 

THERE are two great affirmations which the 
writers of the Bible are continually mak- 
ing: first, the unchangeable, eternal love of 
God, — and this without any limitation or draw- 
back whatever; secondly, the unchangeable, 
eternal law of retribution, — and this, too, with- 
out limitation or drawback. They do this without 
attempting any reconciliation between the two, 

— rather, perhaps, without a thought that the 
two needed reconciliation. The Christian Church 
has made an age-long attempt to reconcile these 
two. The Orthodox believer has generally at- 
tempted to do this by belittling the first, — the 
eternal love ; the Liberal, by belittling the last, 

— the eternal retribution. 

Until very lately, both sides carried on the 
contest with theological weapons, and on high, 
a priori grounds. Neither side sufficiently in- 



156 THE LIFE ETERNAL. 

vestigated the facts of things, — resolutely en- 
deavored to trace out the actual workings of the 
laws of the universe here and now, which here 
and now are working in the same way in which 
they have worked and will work for ever and 
ever. This earth floats now in the midst of the 
one Infinity. There is only one universe, and 
we are now inside it ; only one law, and we now 
governed by it. Why not, then, here and now 
endeavor to find out what law it is that thus 
surrounds us? 

Says Alison, "The sins of individuals are not 
always punished in this world. But nations 
have no immortality ; and therefore " God has to 
punish them in this world. There is a mixture 
of truth and error here. It is as if he said, "As 
nations have no immortality, God is obliged to 
alter his laws of retribution to meet their case, 
as otherwise they would go scot free." But God's 
laws of retribution move on unchanging ever, 
slackening not to save, nor hastening to punish. 
The truth is, that not always, in the small space 
of individual life, has the orb of divine retribu- 
tion time to come round full circle; whereas, 
in the life of a nation, with its millennial periods, 
it has time for one or more full revolutions. 

The earth has been in existence at least a 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 157 

hundred million years, life has been on it at 
least ten million, man has been on it at least 
ten thousand. In any case, we have a very large 
time arc with which to calculate the sweep and 
orbit of the eternal laws. 

When once we look directly at the facts 
around us, we can see that a single fact is 
sufficient to prove that, taking for granted that 
the law is the same for ever and ever, the average 
Orthodox reconciler is in error. No man has 
hitherto been produced, in whose character ab- 
solutely nothing but evil has been proved to 
exist ; and, certainly, no body of men has ever 
been got together, and been proved to be abso- 
lutely incapable of being influenced toward the 
better. Take the scum of all England, and 
dump them down in a wretched Norfolk Island, 
and you can soon establish a pandemonium. But 
if a Captain Machonochie come there too, with 
the cross of Christ in his hand and the blood of 
Christ in his heart, then the hell-fires forthwith 
begin to pale, and God's stars begin to shine 
out again on the poor, forlorn, human lives 
below. 

A single fact will also tend to show that the 
average Liberal reconciler has been no nearer 
the truth. No man has hitherto been found in 



158 THE LIFE ETERNAL. 

whose case retribution has ceased to act, simply 
because retribution has ceased to do him good. 
No drunkard has yet been produced on whom 
whiskey has ceased to exercise an intoxicating 
influence, simply because a merciful God has 
seen that it is of no use to expect that the man 
will stop drinking on account of the retribution 
attending it. Hitherto, the universal experience 
has been that the more the man drinks, the worse 
he gets, and the more is he punished. Hitherto, 
the only way to stop retribution in the drunkard's 
case is to. persuade him to stop drinking. 

The only thorough reconcilement will come 
when we see that heaven and hell are alike the 
results of the workings of one and the self-same 
law. " The laws of disease are as beautiful as 
the laws of health," say the physicians. I assert 
that the laws of disease are the laws of health. 
The same law working one way produces health ; 
working the other, disease. So heaven and hell 
are each but special illustrations of the one and 
the same law of consequences. 

This law is already enthroned in our conception 
of nature. It is the basis of all science. Ere long, 
it will be seen to be the basis of the soul's world 
also. Heaven is that special result of the law 
of consequences whereby good causes produce 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 159 

good consequences. Heaven is eternal, because 
the law that makes it is eternal. Eternally, good 
causes produce good consequences. A good tree 
cannot have evil fruit. Hell is that special result 
of the law of consequences, whereby evil causes 
produce evil consequences. Hell is eternal, be- 
cause the law that makes it is eternal. Eternally, 
evil causes produce evil consequences. An evil 
tree cannot have good fruit. The Buddhists 
have a doctrine which they call Karma. It is 
the doctrine of consequences. Your life is a 
wheel with a million spokes, each spoke an act, 
a thought, a word. In that life-wheel of yours 
you have placed a thousand thousand white 
spokes, with only here and there a black one. 
In the inevitable revolution, each white spoke in 
its turn comes uppermost, and will bring you to 
the heaven corresponding to the good deed it 
represents. There you taste its special joys, 
while the wheel keeps slowly, slowly turning. 
But it moves, nevertheless; and then another 
spoke takes the place of the first. Is it white, 
then you pass from joy to joy, — from a known 
bliss to an unknown ; but is it black, then it 
forces you down, down to the hell corresponding 
to the evil deed that carved that black spoke, 
there to abide during the Ions; ao;es in which that 



160 THE LIFE ETERNAL. 

black spoke is uppermost upon the slowly turn- 
ing wheel. At last, at last, another spoke comes 
uppermost ; and, if that spoke is white, then you 
are emancipated once more, while the awful 
wheel keeps slowly turning. It is an allegory, 
you say. Take, then, to heart the truth it 
contains. 

1. Heaven is good cause, — good consequence. 
It is the prerogative of inspired genius to an- 
ticipate, sometimes by centuries, the slow con- 
clusions of the understanding. Evolution was 
reached but yesterday. But Jesus sees that the 
law of life is growth. The kingdom of heaven 
is leaven, is seed, is the growing corn ; first the 
blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. 
The reign of law is a nineteenth century con- 
ception. But all the great sayings of Jesus 
are based upon the law of consequences. The 
Beatitudes are each a separate illustration of 
this. The blessing grows out of the vital con- 
dition. Virtue is rewarded by growth, by more 
virtue. Blessed are the pure : they shall see the 
all-pure. Blessed are they that hunger and thirst 
after righteousness ; for they shall be filled with 
righteousness. Blessed are the pitiful ; for on 
them the pity eternal shall descend. Forgive, 
and ye shall be forgiven ; give, it shall be given 



HEAVEN AXD HELL. 161 

to you; show kindness, kindness shall be shown 
to you; ask, and ye shall receive; seek, and ye 
shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you ; 
do good, that ye may be the' children of the All- 
Good ; loye your enemies, that ye may be the 
children of Him who loves His enemies. On 
the other hand, Judge not, that ye be not judged ; 
condemn not, that ye be not condemned. With 
what measure ye mete, in that self-same measure 
it shall be measured to you again. If ye forgive 
not, ye shall not be forgiven. 

According to Jesus, then, the rewards of heaven 
grow out of the very life and essence of the 
nobleness rewarded. Innocence clothes herself in 
white, as does the lily, by simply growing. " The 
garments of the angels," says Swedenborg, "grow 
mysteriously out of the emanations of their own 
characters." 

2. Hell is evil cause, — evil consequence. It 
is " curses, like chickens, coming home to roost." 
He loved cursing, so cursing shall come to him ; 
he hated blessing, so it shall be far from him. 
Be not deceived : God is not mocked. That 
which a man sowed, that shall he also reap. He 
sowed the wind : he reaped the whirlwind. This 
law is eternal : therefore %hell is eternal. There 
never was a time when it existed not ; there never 
11 



162 THE LIFE ETERNAL. 

will be a time when it shall cease to be. It is 
also omnipresent. It is on the earth, and in every 
star, and in the spaces between the stars. It is 
in this world : it is in the next. Speaking the- 
ologically, as God's thought of goodness, harmony, 
and love eternally produces heaven, so God's 
thought of sin, discord, and hate eternally pro- 
duces hell. How long, then, will hell exist ? 
Potentially, as long as God exists; that is, it 
will eternally manifest itself under certain con- 
ditions. 

Consider one moment. Is it not absurd to 
suppose that God's judgment about a mean, 
selfish, cowardly, treacherous, cruel, or malig- 
nant act can ever change? Will there ever 
come a time in the years of heaven when mean- 
ness shall cease to be mean in God's sight ? when 
to him, for very pity, a lie shall seem to be truth- 
ful, hate lovely, and oppression just ? Nay, more. 
Can you even imagine that your own private 
opinion of such things can ever change? You 
cannot, and why? Because you inherit into the 
eternal mind. 

Where is hell? Potentially, wherever God 
is; that is, that under certain conditions God's 
presence creates hell, as under certain other 
conditions God's presence creates heaven. God 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 163 

is everywhere. There is no inch of space from 
which his truth, his justice, his love, are absent; 
in which, if they are received and welcomed, 
they will not bless ; in which, if they are re- 
jected and set at naught, they will not punish. 
Nowhere does hate bring happiness; nowhere 
does self-seeking satisfy, wrong triumph, or 
falsehood bless. Hell, then, is potentially every- 
where ; that is, it will manifest itself wherever 
wrong, sin, discord, selfishness, exist ; will begin 
to show itself precisely at the same moment that 
they show themselves. Does any one doubt this ? 
Let him go home, and there, in the dark, obey 
the fundamental law of hell, which is frantic 
self-seeking, and see if it do not start up at once 
from underneath the floor. There is no surer 
instinct in the heart of man than his prophetic 
sense that punishment eternally follows wrong. 
Whenever gross wrong is committed, whenever 
the weak are oppressed, whenever the fatherless 
and widow are robbed of their inheritance, when- 
ever crime brings seeming success, — no matter 
how high the offender, how surrounded with 
whole armies of guards, or how low and weak 
and unaided the souls he tramples on, — the in- 
dignant, outraged heart of man is sure, as if God 
spoke it from heaven, that a day of reckoning 



164 THE LIFE ETERNAL. 

will come, that innocent blood will be avenged. 
All is well; for, if any thing is not well, it is 
w r ell that it should not be well. It is well that 
oppression should not be well ; that envy, hatred, 
malice, and all uncharitableness should not be 
well. If these things were well, — if human 
happiness came from them, — then God were no 
God at all, but an omnipotent devil, the laws of 
whose world worked for the bad against the good, 
for darkness against light. The presence of God, 
the immanence of God, is as much proved by the 
existence of hell as by the existence of heaven. 

It is in vain to hope that hell is confined to 
this life and this earth. God knows we have 
enough of it here ; but a careful study of its 
phenomena here is enough to teach us that it 
stretches far on into the hereafter. 

There was once, at an English university, 
an able man of peculiarly fascinating manners 
and magnetic influence on all who came near 
him, — an influence which he too often used for 
purely selfish ends. He was a thorough man 
of pleasure, and seemed utterly careless of the 
misery or remorse which his gratification brought 
to others. This man was suddenly stricken 
down with a seemingly fatal disease, — a disease, 
however, which left his head clear to think. In 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 165 

the long, weary hours of day and night, thoughts, 
which in health he had forced away, began to 
crowd upon his soul. What a pitiful, mean, 
contemptible life his had been ! How utterly 
purposeless, how small, how unworthy of his 
powers, — powers which had so often caused 
only misery, when they might have brought 
blessing! At last, the eternal judgment on such 
as he arose in his mind clear and strong ; and 
from his burdened heart he put up a prayer for 
life, — not from any mean fear of death, but 
simply that he might have time to undo the 
dreadful evil he had done. The prayer seemed 
granted. He rose to life and health again, and 
at once prepared to fulfil the sacred promise he 
had made. Of all his past sins, the meanest and 
blackest seemed to be one that he had committed 
against a simple, innocent, and loving soul that 
had fatally trusted him. He resolved to search 
for that poor, lost woman, — lost through him. 
But such lost ones are often hard to find. He 
went to live in London, and devoted himself 
to the lifting up of such as he feared she had 
become ; and many that had been dead arose 
and called him blessed. But, day after day and 
night after night, his search after that one con- 
tinued. At last, one dark midnight, he was 



166 THE LIFE ETERNAL. 

standing watching by a lamp-post the stream 
of painted misery as it swept by him on the 
pavement: the door of an evil house close by 
burst open, and tw r o drunken women, fighting, 
scratching, tearing each other, staggered out. 
One gave the other a violent blow, which felled 
her, and caused her head to strike against the 
curbstone. It was over in a moment. The 
watcher sprang forward, and bent down to help 
the fallen woman. Tenderly he took off her 
poor, torn bonnet, and then by the lamplight 
he gazed at the poor dead face ; for he saw at 
once that the blow had killed her. He gazed, 
and out from that sordid misery came the ghastly 
likeness of the face he had so long sought in 
vain. Then he found that, in one short earth- 
life, there was not time enough to undo the evil 
he had done. And, therefore, he prayed once 
again that God might mercifully teach him to 
scorn the thought of rest in heaven, till that 
poor, lost soul, cleansed from every stain, should 
enter with him the blessed gates. The vision is 
for many days. 

The Irish girl devoutly believes that she can 
help to pray her parents out of purgatory. And 
so she can, if she prays the right kind of prayer. 
Get rid, my friend, of every vulgar taint that 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 167 

father or mother put into your blood. That 
is the help they sorely need from you. What 
self-respecting parent can dare to think of heaven 
for himself, while low propensities of his own 
planting are alive in the breast of his son, — 
ay, or his son's son? It is said that there are 
noble families in England suffering still from the 
consequences of the pleasures of the reign of 
Charles the Second. How much heaven can the 
pleasure-loving ancestor enjoy, think you, though 
he repented never so sincerely at the eleventh 
hour, while seed of his sowing is still ripening to 
bitter fruit? The vision is for many days. 

This is a terrible statement, you say. Yes, 
terrible, but true ; and it needs the most power- 
ful statement of its terror and its truth to rouse 
up the miserable sleepers in our own too com- 
fortable Zion. A man tells you, with much 
unction: " Oh, yes! I believe in universal salva- 
tion. I argue it with all my friends!" and 
forthwith expects you to welcome him with 
open arms as a brother, while it is very probably 
your duty to say to him : " Sir, I am heartily sorry 
to hear you say this. Just such do-nothings and 
be-nothings as you are the leaden weights which 
are sinking our holy cause. It is such as you 
that make the free gospel of the love eternal 



168 THE LIFE ETERNAL. 

contemptible. The one boon you can confer 
upon us, while your life continues to be as 
mean and vulgar as it is, is to cease, if only 
for our sakes, to believe it." 

The saddest thing is that some really fine 
spirits are to-day in some such prison as this. 
" Great grief seized me," says Dante, " for I 
knew that great souls were in that limbo." The 
most tragi-comic of all the hells is the hell whither 
those go who do not believe there is any hell. 

When the mighty Theseus sought a bride for 
his friend, Pirithous, he resolved to descend to 
Hades, and thence abduct the fair Proserpine 
herself, the one flower of Pluto's dreary realm. 
He descended : he passed without attack the 
great three-headed dog of hell ; the Furies' 
snakes hissed not at hirn ; the fires of Tar- 
tarus themselves seemed to fear to touch so 
great a hero as he. No one dared molest 
him ; so, after wandering awhile till he was 
weary, he sat down on a great stone to rest 
himself. Till that moment, he himself had not 
even guessed how great a man he was. What 
lordly power must sit on his brow, that hell 
itself should fear him ! He sat and sat, in full- 
browed contemplation. Aj last, quite rested, he 
resolved to arise and resume his journey ; but he 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 169 

found that he could not get up. Only this, and 
nothing more. No torture, no Furies' scourges, 
no fire, no devouring beast. He merely was 
unable to get up or do any thing but sit ; and 
the story leaves him there. Theseus sits, and 
for ever will sit. Such vengeance did the irony 
of the gods inflict on him. 

I have seen admirable, heroic Liberals sitting 
in this very hell. And the tragedy is that they 
will never know it till, like Theseus, they try to 
get up. They sit ; and human life, with all its 
wild sorrow, its unsatisfied longing, its unan- 
swered questions, passes by them in sad proces- 
sion ; but still there. they sit. They sit and w^ait; 
and justice also w^aits, truth waits, love waits, 
heaven waits, and hell enlarges its borders, and 
cries out, " There is room ! " 

3. But, these things being so, what hope is 
there, or can there be, for mankind as a whole? 
The first hope for mankind is based on the fact 
that hell is eternal ; for, the moment it ceased to 
be so, that moment it would hopelessly begin. 
Tt is the persistency of God in the natural world, 
where every natural cause is indissolubly linked 
to its consequence, which alone enables man to 
learn the laws which govern matter, and lovingly 
to obey them. And it is the persistency of God 



170 THE LIFE ETERNAL. 

in the spiritual world, where every spiritual cause 
is indissolubly linked to its consequence, which 
alone enables man to learn the laws of spirit, 
and lovingly to obey them. 

If fire burned to-day, and did not burn to- 
morrow, no child would have any fingers left. 
Just because fire eternally burns, the stupidest 
child learns at last not to put his fingers into 
it. Certain chemical combinations are always 
possible, and, when made, the result is eternally 
the same ; but that is no reason why we need 
make the combinations. Here is a white-hot 
poker, yonder is a barrel of gunpowder. Certain 
very surprising results eternally ensue, if I plunge 
that poker into that gunpowder ; but that is the 
very reason why I do not plunge that poker into 
that gunpowder. Just so, if sin harmed to-day 
and did not harm to-morrow, how could we know 
the eternal connection between sin and sorrow? 
Just because the fires of hate eternally burn, the 
most foolish of us can learn at last not to hate ; 
just because for ever crime stabs itself with its 
own hands, men will at last learn not to commit 
crime. Envy, malice, and uncharitableness eter- 
nally poison the soul's life ; but that will not harm 
us, when we have learned not to be envious, 
malicious, uncharitable. Ignorance will always 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 171 

err ; but that fact will not harm us, when knowl- 
edge has become pleasant to our souls. Hate will 
always make life hateful ; but that will not harm 
us, when Christ's own love is shed abroad in our 
hearts. 

We look for God's mercy in the wrong place. 
We foolishly think that we shall find it in his 
reluctance to inflict pain, or certainly in his re- 
fusal to keep on inflicting pain after a certain 
limited time ; whereas it is just that pain, that 
anguish, that gnashing of teeth, which is the 
dread but loving angel of his presence, — 
which sternly yet most mercifully refuses to 
allow one atom of hate to bring happiness, one 
atom of cursing to bring blessing, through all 
the eternal years. 

The second hope rests in the fact that heaven 
is eternal. The gates of heaven are eternally 
open. Whosoever wills can enter in for ever 
and ever. And the gates of heaven are every- 
where. " Hell is not two hand-breadths from 
heaven." Yon can pass from one to the other 
by one single leap of the will. If God loved men 
to-day, and did not love them to-morrow, — loved 
them in this life, and did not love them in the 
next, — then mankind would sink in despair. 
But, just because God loves mankind eternally, 



172 THE LIFE ETERNAL. 

the most foolish of men will find out God's love 
at last. It waits and waits, till the blindest soul fc 
shall see it. Yes, here is the hope. Ever let us 
remember that we all, saint and sinner alike, are 
living, and will for ever live, in the midst of God, 
bathed for ever by the waves of that unutterable 
deep of love, that hath no shore. 

The third and last hope is the gospel. That 
is the good tidings of the love eternal entering 
the heart of man, and from that essential van- 
tage-ground working on man's destiny. It is 
God incarnate in man. The gospel message is 
that God is eternally God ; Christ, Christ; and 
good men, good men. If the gospel said, u Be 
good to-day, so that you need not be good to- 
morrow," a Love all mankind in this world, so 
that you need not do so any more in the next," 
then there would be no hope that man would 
ever perform his essential part in the work of 
human redemption ; that the good tidings would 
ever get preached to the spirits in prison ; that, 
upon those who now sit in darkness and the 
shadow of death, the true light would ever shine. 
But it is just because the gospel is eternally the 
same, just because goodness is for ever true to 
itself, — for ever manifests its gracious quality 
as helper and redeemer of lost souls everywhere. 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 173 

— that we are able to cling to the eternal 
hope. 

This is a point which any manly mind can see, 
my friend. You may have been confused by the 
Babel voices of creed and dogma. You may 
not as yet know that God is infinitely good, and 
therefore infinitely adorable, though for that 
knowledge you may have searched as for hid treas- 
ure. But this at least you can see, — that it is a 
manly attitude for you to take, to resolve to stand 
by mankind, whatever comes of it; to share the 
fate of man, whatever that fate may be. And 
you can see also that it is a cowardly attitude 
for you to take, to be ready and willing to 
accept a heaven in which your forlorn brothers 
and sisters have no share. Act, then, on this 
golden gleam of insight, and already half the 
gospel is your own ; for you have resolved to love 
your neighbor as yourself. This third hope is 
as essential as the love of God himself. Man is 
eternally bound to man. Man's redemption is 
worked out by God working in man, by man, 
through man. In all reverence, then, we say 
that it is impossible for God to save mankind 
without man's help, — without God's being pres- 
ent, not only outside of, but inside of, human 
consciousness. It is the doctrine of the incar- 



174 THE LIFE ETERNAL. 

nation. If, then, we wait for God outside of man 
to do what only God and man acting together 
can do, we may wait for ever, and w r ait in 
vain. God has no hands. It is therefore folly 
to pray that he will do what only hands can do. 
When God needs hands, he creates them, and 
puis a keen brain above them and a loving heart 
abreast of them, and bids them do his beautiful 
will. God, then, strikes a wrong through a true 
man's hands. If the true man folds his arms up, 
then the proud, boastful wrong stalks unsmitten 
and defiant. There is such a brutal directness 
in the force of wrong that we are prone, in our 
atheism, to believe that, in a certain w r ay, it is 
stronger than right. And so it is, in a certain 
way. A fierce, proud, self-confident wrong is 
stronger than a timid, apologizing, mistrustful 
ri<2rht. A milk-and-water ano-el is no match for 
a masterful devil. Only when Michael, the strong 
archangel, God's valiant knight, sworn defender 
of his oppressed and despised truth and love, 
fights against Satan, then, and then only, is that 
old serpent sure to bite the dust. 

Friends, we have this matter in our own hands. 
Under God, the human will is the final arbiter 
of this mighty question. Hell for man will last 
just as long as man chooses it to last. How long 



HEAVEN AND HELL. 175 

will the hell in Washington or New York last? 
Just as long as the men and women of New 
York or Washington please. Let us, then, cease 
to ask, u Is hell eternal?" Thank God it is, in 
the sense that eternally evil causes produce evil 
effects. Let us rather ask, " How long, friends 
and lovers and servants of the eternal love, shall 
we suffer this and that human hell to last? In 
the name of the Eternal, let us rise up and 
cause it to cease." Hell fears such words as 
these, and vanishes everywhere before the deeds 
they prompt. 

Who loves man as God loves him, for ever 
and ever? Who has cast behind his back, with 
manly scorn, all dream of a selfish bliss, — of a 
bliss which all mankind everywhere, in this world 
and in the next, do not share ? Who has resolved 
to share the fate of man, come weal, come woe, 
heaven or no heaven ? God waits for us to take 
this attitude, that he may give us his full bless- 
ing, which is the fulness of his spirit, which is 
himself. " He that loveth his soul shall lose it; 
but he that loseth his soul for God's sake, for 
man's sake, shall find it." 



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